Hitler's Lorenz coding machine meets nemesis at U.K. WWII code-breaking site

LONDON – The machine that Hitler used to send coded messages to his generals on Friday met the supercomputer that revealed its secrets, watched by veteran operatives whose painstaking work helped bring World War II to an end. Scientists at Bletchley Park in southern England, the WWII code-breaking headquarters, fired up the valves, whirring wheels and spinning tors of the two machines to re-create how German military chiefs sent secret messages and how they were deciphered. Hitler's Lorenz machine boasted 1.6 million billion possible coding combinations thanks to a series of twelve rotors, a million times more complex than the more feted Enigma machine. Through luck and the ingenuity of engineer Tommy Flowers, scientists were able to deduce how the machine operated and then build a machine to work out the settings of Lorenz's rotors. "Colossus" is regarded as the world's first programmable, electronic digital computer, but received little attention as the project was kept secret for decades, depriving those responsible of due accolades.