Rare Second World War Nazi code machine on display in Waterloo

A new exhibit at the City of Waterloo Museum is inviting visitors to step back in time and crack the code.

An authentic Second World War Enigma machine is now on display at the museum – along with information about the University of Waterloo’s special connection to decoding Nazi messages.

It’s part of Cipher I Decipher, a new travelling exhibit from the Canada Science and Technology Museum.

Retrieved from Nazi-era Germany, the Enigma cipher machine now on display in Waterloo would have been used to send and receive encrypted communications about military movements and strategy.

“Each day the Germans would send out new settings and you would type in your code,” explains Jennifer Huber, museum programs and engagement associate. “It would run through the machine, and it would get each letter encoded nine different times, with the rotors changing after every single letter. So solving that became quite tricky.”

Aside from the rare opportunity to see an authentic Enigma machine, the exhibit showcases other historic communication encryption artifacts like telegraph keys for Morse code.

An Enigma machine retrieved from a German submarine is on display at the City of Waterloo Museum. (Spencer Turcotte/CTV Kitchener)Visitors can also take a crack at cryptology themselves, ciphering and diciphering their own secret messages.

And that’s not all they’ll learn.

“What most people don't know is that Waterloo has their very own codebreaker Bill Tutte,” Huber says.

Tutte is credited with cracking the vastly complicated Lorenz code and helping stop Hitler’s advance.

The University of Waterloo math professor’s cryptanalysis work at Bletchley Park north of London was kept a secret for most of his life.

“There were literally hundreds of other mathematicians and whether they'd be assigned to the project and able to do this --- I don't know,” UW systems design lecturer Scott Campbell says.

Not only was Tutte’s work credited with saving millions of lives, codebreaking on the Lorenz and Enigma machines laid the groundwork for modern cybersecurity.

“This simply solidified the importance going forward for the security agencies in Canada, the United States in Great Britain and around the world,” Campbell says.

You don’t have to look further than Waterloo and BlackBerry to see its influence. The cellphone’s messenger app became the first to protect users’ personal information from end to end.

“There was a transformation in terms of recognizing encryption as vital to the security of these networks,” Campbell says.

So while the Enigma machine left a lot of people scratching their heads throughout history, when it comes to Waterloo’s fingerprint on cracking crucial codes, there’s no mystery.

The Cipher I Decipher exhibition will be at the City of Waterloo Museum until Dec. 29, 2023.

The museum is open Tuesday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day.

Admission is free.