Secrets in the Shadows of History: The Enigma Cipher Centre in Poznań

A film that has fascinated me in recent years is about Alan Turing and the legendary Enigma machine during the Second World War. When I found out that the Centrum Szyfrów Enigma (Enigma Cipher Centre) exists in Poznań, my mind was made up immediately: I had to see this with my own eyes.

Anyone who hears the word “museum” and thinks of endless corridors with dusty display cases and exhausting information boards will be proven wrong here. For me, this visit was one of the most exciting and interactive experiences I’ve had in a long time. I was truly able to immerse myself in the hidden world of spies and mathematicians.

The Setting: A Building with Many Faces

The museum isn’t just housed anywhere. It is located in the Collegium Martineum. This place has been on a historical rollercoaster ride of its own. It all began in the mid-19th century when a rather castle-like building was erected on this site for the intendancy of the Prussian army. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Poznań branch of the Polish military cipher bureau used exactly this location. This was the cradle of the codebreakers.

As a visitor, you are therefore entering the exact “scene of the crime” of history. During the Second World War, the original building was heavily damaged, and after the war, it was replaced by a rather clunky structure that served as the headquarters of the communist Polish United Workers’ Party. After the fall of communism, Adam Mickiewicz University moved in and used the rooms for its Faculty of History until 2015. Today, the building shines in completely new splendor and has been home to the Centrum Szyfrów Enigma Poznań (Enigma Cipher Centre) since the autumn of 2021.

“True history. A challenge for the mind.” That is the motto of the centre, and my mind was certainly challenged!

How the Enigma Promised the Impossible

The Enigma, whose name appropriately comes from Greek and means “riddle” or “puzzle”, was quite inconspicuous at first glance. It resembled a clunky typewriter built into a heavy wooden box. But beneath the keyboard lay an electro-mechanical rotor cipher machine of unimaginable complexity. It was used before and during the Second World War by the German army, navy, and air force to encrypt highly secret messages.

The radio operator typed a plaintext letter (e.g., an “A”) on the keyboard. Current flowed through the machine, and a different letter (e.g., an “X”) lit up on a lampboard. That was the encrypted letter, which was then transmitted via Morse code. The tricky part: with every keystroke, the mechanical rotors inside rotated further, changing the entire electrical circuit. For example, if you typed an “A” three times in a row, “X”, “L”, and “Q” might light up consecutively. On the front of the machine, the operator also plugged in cables that swapped certain pairs of letters before the current flowed into the rotors.

The German military considered the Enigma absolutely unbreakable. The reason for this lay in the sheer unimaginable number of possible starting settings. The standard army Enigma allowed for around 159 quintillion possible starting configurations. To read a message, the sender and receiver had to configure their machines exactly the same way, and this daily key was changed right at midnight. The fact that this code could still be broken is considered one of the greatest intellectual masterstrokes of the 20th century.

The True Heroes of Decryption

The story of the decryption is often vastly simplified and attributed almost exclusively to the British genius Alan Turing. However, the Cipher Centre in Poznań tells the prequel and puts the true pioneers in the spotlight: the Polish mathematicians and cryptologists Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski, and Jerzy Różycki. These three brilliant graduates of the University of Poznań began their top-secret work here in 1932, long before the outbreak of the Second World War.

They achieved the mathematical breakthrough. They created the crucial theoretical foundations and even built the first functioning replicas of the Enigma machine. As the threat from Nazi Germany became increasingly tangible and the German machines grew more complex, the Poles handed over all their hard-earned knowledge to the British and French shortly before the invasion of their country in 1939. Only thanks to this prior knowledge was the team at Bletchley Park, led by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, able to develop the massive electro-mechanical computing machines that cracked the code automatically. This allowed the Allies to read top-secret radio traffic for years.

Today, historians agree that this “Ultra” intelligence material shortened the war in Europe by two to four years.

My Tour: From the Old Wooden Stick to Modern Cryptography

What makes the visit so special is the concept of the museum. The Cipher Centre is not a classic, static museum with dusty display cases, but is designed as an interactive experience. The exhibition takes you on a journey that begins long before the 20th century. I was amazed at how far back the history of cryptography reaches. One station showed one of the oldest techniques, the so-called scytale: a strip of leather or parchment is wrapped around a wooden stick so that the seemingly jumbled letters suddenly make sense. I certainly wouldn’t have come up with this clever idea on my own!

The audio guide is indispensable during the tour through the exhibition. It activates automatically in some of the rooms, but can also be used to call up additional information at various stations. With the help of the audio guide, the history surrounding the Enigma truly “comes to life”. A huge plus for international visitors: all instructions, puzzles, and audio tracks are available in German and English. This made solving the puzzles extremely easy, as I didn’t have to painstakingly translate everything.

At countless interactive stations, I was allowed to crack codes, solve puzzles, and encrypt messages myself. I understood some systems surprisingly quickly; with others, I was completely stumped for quite a while despite the instructions. Above all, I learned one thing from this: a cryptologist needs analytical sharpness and infinite patience. Would that be the right job for me? After a few frustrating but all the more amusing failed attempts on the machines, I doubt it. But it is precisely this interactive experience that makes the museum so unforgettable.

Visitor Information

Address

ul. Św. Marcin 78,
61-809 Poznań, Polen

The visit to the exhibition took place as part of a collaboration with the Polish Tourism Organization in Berlin and thePoznań Tourism Organisation .

Published 23 August 2026