“Enigma” (2001)

The work

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesThe screenplay, based on Robert Harris’s novel, was written by Tom Stoppard, and the film was directed by Michael Apted; the cast includes Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet.⁴

Chris Christensen, in the peer-reviewed ‘Mathematics Magazine’ (2007), notes that the novel’s hero, Tom Jericho, is a mathematician whose successes are loosely based on the work of Alan Turing.²

The real case

At the turn of 1932 and 1933 the cryptologists of the Polish Cipher Bureau – Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski – read the first messages enciphered with military Enigma. In July 1939 at Pyry they passed their knowledge to the French and British, which according to GCHQ transformed the British approach to breaking the machine.^3,5

Christensen quotes Stuart Milner-Barry of Bletchley Park as writing that the Polish team was not incorporated into the work at Bletchley during the war.²

The controversy

In September and October 2001 the Federation of Poles in Great Britain (Zjednoczenie Polskie w Wielkiej Brytanii) appealed to the Polish community to send letters of protest to ‘The Times’, ‘The Daily Telegraph’, ‘The Guardian’ and local newspapers. The appeal describes the character of a Pole working at Bletchley Park who betrays secrets to the Germans because the British are silent about Katyń, where his brother died. The organisation regarded this as a slur on Poles, while acknowledging the author’s right to fiction.¹

According to the appeal, the film contains only one brief mention of the Polish cryptologists. The Federation asked the producers and the author for short captions recalling the Polish contribution, and for a plaque at Bletchley Park commemorating Rejewski, Różycki and Zygalski.¹

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesA reviewer for the Australian paper ‘The Catholic Leader’ wrote in November 2001 that rather than share the credit with the Poles, the film paints them as the villains.⁴

What came next

A plaque to the Polish cryptologists was put up at Bletchley Park in 2002; the Imperial War Museums memorials register describes it as commemorating the three mathematicians of Polish intelligence who first broke Enigma.⁶

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesIn 2022 the historian Tadeusz Paweł Rutkowski of the University of Warsaw cited Apted’s film, alongside works of fiction, as an example of untrue accounts of the breaking of Enigma that credit it to the British.⁷