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good throughout the Spanish Civil War. But the wiring was different in the Germans’ own
military version of the machine, and Knox could not discover it.
Rejewski found the answer by inspired guesswork. Dilly’s first agitated question to him at
the Warsaw conference was ‘What is the QWERTZU?’. ‘QWERTZU’ was Dilly’s way of refer-
ring to the entry-plate’s wiring. Rejewski answered immediately, now that he was able to reveal
his secrets. The keyboard was wired to the entry plate in straightforward alphabetical order,
ABCDE . . .!
The Poles had learned from Bertrand about Dilly’s Enigma successes, and they had specifi-
cally requested that he should be among the party attending the Warsaw conference. Dilly was
in bed with influenza at the time, and had just had his first cancer operation, but his family
remembered him getting out of bed ashen grey, determined to make the journey to Warsaw.
It was on 27 July 1939 that he met Rejewski and the other Polish mathematicians, Henryk
Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki, in a clearing in the Pyry forest near Warsaw. Rejewski recalled in
a 1978 interview that Dilly was an excellent cryptographer, a ‘specialist of a different kind’, and
figure 11.3 Marian Rejewski.
From Wladyslaw Kozaczuk, Enigma (Arms and Armour Press, 1984).