Was the decrypting of communications in WW2 a one-sided effort, or did Germany also do it? [closed]

Question

Lately, I've read a lot about how the "Allies" in WW2 (I always found that term strange since the others were also "allies", just not with the USA!) kept breaking all the German ciphers from both the Enigma and Lorenz machines in all their variations and upgrades. From the sound of it, the USA and "Allies" were basically able to "predict" Germany's every move by being able to decrypt their communication messages.

My question is: did Germany not do this in the opposite direction at all? If so, why not? If they did, I sure have never read one darn word about it anywhere. It would be extremely interesting to hear about such efforts and how successful they were.

Answer 1

The Germans certainly tried, and did have some successes, but not on the same scale as the Western Allies. They read British naval ciphers until 1943, which contributed to their successes in the Battle of the Atlantic, and were able to eavesdrop on the scrambled telephone link between the UK and USA.

Their lesser scale of success seems to have been due to the fragmentation and duplication of their efforts. A single large-scale organisation like the British Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), based at Bletchley Park, was quite foreign to Nazi ideas of organisation.

They also suffered from "mirror-imaging", assuming that their enemies worked in the same way as them. They found it hard to believe that anyone could assemble the scale of effort required to break their ciphers, which led them to discount the clues that the Enigma was broken.