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Raid on Dieppe masked secret mission to steal Nazis’ Enigma machine
Andrew Gumbel
© Provided by The Guardian
Photograph: Getty
Two years after ordering the mass internment of German refugees at the start of the second world war, the British government put a small, elite group of them in military uniforms and sent them on a secret cloak-and-dagger mission to occupied Dieppe to snatch an Enigma coding machine from under the Nazis’ noses.
A new book published later this month presents extraordinary evidence that the refugees, all Germans who had fled from Nazi-annexed Sudetenland, were at the centre of military planning for the daring and ultimately disastrous August 1942 raid on Dieppe. The idea was that while British and Canadian troops staged a frontal assault on the port, a group of five refugee soldiers would break into a hotel used by Nazi military commanders and steal both the Enigma machine and the code books that enabled the German ....

Canada , Dieppe , Haute-normandie , France , Bletchley , Milton-keynes , United-kingdom , Germany , United-states , Hungary , Netherlands , Belgium