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Extremely scarce, fully functional Swiss Enigma K (or Swiss-K) electromechanical cipher machine, the variant used by Switzerland's military and foreign ministry during World War II, a time when the neutral nation was surrounded by Axis-controlled territory. Based on the standard commercial Enigma K by Heimsoeth und Rinke, Berlin, the Swiss-K is differentiated by its wider Swiss-made wooden case that accommodates its external lamp panel, which allowed an officer or clerk to view and record the message being deciphered by the Enigma operator.
The Swiss began using the machines in 1938 with an initial order of 14 commercial Enigma K machines, followed by 65 more in 1939, and two larger batches received in May and July 1940, bringing the total to 265 machines in use by July 1942: 102 with the Swiss Army and 163 with the Swiss Air Force; the Foreign Ministry used machines on loan from the Army. Of these 265 Swiss-K machines, fewer than twenty are known today.
The top of the cipher machine's housing bears its serial number plate, reading "K772," and features windows for its four settable rotors: three cipher rotors (marked "I," "II," and "III," all with matching serial number "K772") that move during encoding, and one special reflector rotor (serial number "K787"), which is preset by the operator. Stored inside the lid are extra lightbulbs and the green contrast filter. Includes the external power supply unit, built by the Swiss company H. Stucki Transformatorenbau in Bern, marked "772" on the case; these rare power supplies were used exclusively by the Swiss military and the Swiss Foreign Office to power as many as four Swiss-K Enigmas at once. Unlike the Wehrmacht Enigmas, the Swiss-K did not employ a plugboard (Steckerbrett) and its rotors were lettered rather than numbered.
The Swiss Enigma K has a standard German "QWERTZ" keyboard with 26 white-on-black keys, with matching "QWERTZ" lighted display. When a key is pressed, the corresponding encoded letter—as determined by the specific arrangement of the rotor wheels—is illuminated. With each key press, the rotors step to produce a new enciphering route—thus, an easily crackable simple substitution cipher is avoided, as letters are not encoded the same way twice. Though originally delivered with standard commercial wiring, the Swiss immediately altered the wiring of the cipher rotors for security. In 1941, after finding out that the French had decoded some of their Enigma traffic, the Swiss Army also modified the stepping mechanisms of their machines to further obfuscate the code.
Despite the modifications, Swiss Enigma traffic, especially diplomatic messages, was compromised: the Swiss codes were read by Allied cryptanalysts from the start of the war, and German intelligence also broke them from 1939 onwards. The machines were decommissioned in 1946 and replaced by the Swiss-designed NEMA, which addressed lessons learned from the vulnerabilities of the Swiss-K and represented a significant advancement in rotor-based cryptography.
