Yet despite the controversial conflicts, issues and personalities surrounding the topic, before 2014's release of The Imitation Game, only two feature films have been based on this richly dramatic subject. Many documentaries have been made about Enigma, Bletchley Park and Turing. The main target of the Bletchley team was not the German's original so-called 'Enigma' cipher but the more technologically sophisticated version code-named 'Tunny' by the British. In the last couple of decades,the general public has become aware of the crucial role that Bletchley Park (and in particular the mathematician Alan Turing) played in unravelling Germany's military secrets and helping win the war. The significance of the 'Enigma Machine', and the unlocking of its secrets by a team of cryptological and mathematical geniuses at the top secret English location of Bletchley Park remained unknown and unheralded for many years after the end of the war. They had also made copies of the machine. However, the Germans were unaware that Poland's Cipher Bureau, with its team of brilliant mathematicians and cryptologists, had not only unlocked secrets of the Enigma Machine's encoding method. During the 1920s and 1930s the German military transformed this commercial encoding device into an incredibly sophisticated encoding system to transmit top-secret orders and messages to German military units on land and sea. A recipient with another Enigma machine used a key to unlock the code. The rotors produced billions of possible combinations for the original message.

Used complicated sets of rotors, to change the letters or combinations of letters in a message or document into what seemed to be randomly selected substitutes.

The Enigma machine was originally a commercial German encoding apparatus developed after World War I.

The enigma code