This seems like an oversimplification, if the fault of Enigma truly was that it was so overengineered that in actual field use the Germans took shortcuts on the ciphering process that made it crackable.
The Germans are certainly renown for overengineering everything.
The device itself was amazing, and without mechanical help, wasn't crackable. The wartime effort to develop a single-purpose computer along with the Polish effort to provide the allied forces with an Enigma device are what did it in. The flaw was merely the hook the allies used once a device was in hand.
If the Polish resistance hadn't got their hands on an Enigma, then it probably would have remained a mystery, much like the Code Talkers did to the NAZI forces.
So it's not really an oversimplification, it's more of a hardware zero-day exploit, but again, without a machine in hand the effort to decrypt would have theoretically taken a lot longer.
I'm still a bit confused on this point as mainstream history paints the picture that the only reason that the Allies even had a chance to "win" WW2 was because the Germans made mistakes that left their otherwise-too-superior positions assailable.
The famous ones are Stalingrad, bombing the British cities instead of the RAF fields and, of course, the ole "no one woke up Hitler on D-Day."
A less famous one is that Enigma was being used improperly by the Germans. Oddly enough, modern hollywood even circled back to this in a Sherlock Holmes adaptation made in the '10s, where some higher-IQ nigger pretending to be a legit businessman used it to instruct his gang of street thugs.
I'm a bit confused too about Poland and the (((Allies))) cracking Enigma before WW2, as then Poland would have no excuse for getting so thrashed, would have known what Stalin was up to (The allies didn't care that Stalin invaded Poland the same month that Hitler did), and Hitler thought very highly of Poland, to the point that he even held a special funeral for its premier, the last time that Hitler is known to have gone to a public church service.
Had this premier, Jozef Pilsudski, lived past 1935, it is said that Hitler would not have had to invade Poland, that a solution to the oppression of the Germans under Polish control would have been worked out peacefully. Supposedly this Pilsudski fellow did not reciprocate Hitler's brotherly love, and the Poles working in effective concert with what would become the (((Allies))) prior to the war by breaking Hitler's cipher was certainly not a "bro move".
Looking over at Wikipedia, its synopsis on Enigma mentions it was Germans being (uncharacteristically) lax with using Enigma as directed that led to its cipher being cracked. Wikipedia also mentions that, as of 2018, there was an Enigma message from 1945 that had yet to be deciphered.
They were very lax with it. Part of that was the rigid German system, part of that was the thought that no one could crack the code.
We know perfectly well how the Enigma operates (today, that is) - I find it hard to believe there's a message that's still unencoded unless it was a joke or a faulty encode where the writer added some salt to the message. The Enigma itself wasn't unclassified until 1977 (I think) in the States, so perhaps there's something in that message that's damning?
I think the German overconfidence in their superiority probably did them more damage than anything else. The British were turning out aircraft be dozen from piano factories and tunnels. The Americans were just fucking nuts. The Russians stood back and let Mother Nature do them in. So many mistakes were made because of underestimating that it eventually lost them the war.
(post is archived)