Reservehandverfahren was a German Naval World War II hand-cipher system used as a backup method when no working Enigma machine was available.
Front cover of general Reservehandverfahren instruction booklet
The Enigma machine is a cipher device developed and used in the early- to mid-20th century to protect commercial, diplomatic, and military communication. It was employed extensively by Nazi Germany du
Reservehandverfahren
…Reservehandverfahren (RHV) (English: Reserve Hand Procedure) was a German Naval World War II hand-cipher system used as a backup method when no working Enigma machine was available. The cipher had two stages: a transposition followed by bigram substitution. In the transposition stage, the cipher clerk would write out…
Military Model Enigma I, in use from 1930
A memorial in Bydgoszcz, Poland, to Marian Rejewski, the mathematician who, in 1932, first broke Enigma and, in July 1939, helped educate the French and British about Polish methods of Enigma decryption
Enigma rotor assembly. In the Enigma I, three movable rotors are sandwiched between two fixed wheels: the entry wheel, on the right, and the reflector on the left.