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There is a lot of information about the British code breakers at Bletchey Park and the work they did for cryptography, computing and the war effort.

Still, I haven't heard a lot about a German counterpart. Why is this? Did the Germans have a code breaking facility similar to Bletchey Park during WWII? If not, why?

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As a side note, if you are interested in WWII cryptography, and don't mind some fiction, I highly reccomend reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. – T.E.D.♦ May 4 '12 at 15:19
thanks. I already have :) – santiagozky May 7 '12 at 10:10

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Generally, individual branches of the armed forces were responsible for countering the codes of their allied opposition. The German naval intelligence agency (Beobachtungsdienst) broke the British naval codes.

The unified UK code-breaking effort was helped by a single system being used so widely across the German forces.

One of the ironic bits of cryptography history is that every side broke almost all the codes of their enemy while refusing to believe that their own codes were anything less than perfect.

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Any idea of why the Germans did not unified their code breaking efforts like UK did? was the existence of Bletchey park unknown for the Germans? – santiagozky May 7 '12 at 10:13
The UK's central efforts made sense because the Germans had a single system, otherwise it made sense for naval experts to work on enemy naval codes and so on. – mgb May 8 '12 at 12:53

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