In it, the paper outlines the history of the palace, describing it as “one of Poland’s most distinctive buildings prior to World War Two.”
Between 1930 and 1937, the Saxon Palace was used by the Polish Armed Forces Cipher Office, and it was there that the German Enigma machine codes were first cracked in 1932 by three Polish mathematicians, Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Żygalski.
The Jerusalem Post reports that they “created a copy of the German Enigma machine, known as the Polish Enigma, and … in the summer of 1939, at a meeting of French and British cryptologists near Warsaw, they … passed on two of their Enigma machine replicas, one to the British and one to the French.”
This laid the foundations for the wartime code-breaking carried out by Britain and their allies, the paper notes.
After suppressing the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the Germans blew up the palace as part of their planned destruction of Warsaw.
The Israeli daily reports on last week’s ceremony in Warsaw during which President Andrzej Duda submitted a bill to parliament on the rebuilding of the Saxon Palace as a symbolic completion of the city’s reconstruction from the ruins of World War II.
According to preliminary plans, the project is scheduled to completed by 2028.
The only section of the Saxon Palace which has survived to this day is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, part of Warsaw's central Piłsudski Square.
(mk/gs)
