Franciszek Pokorny

Major Franciszek Pokorny was a Polish Army officer who headed the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau before Major (eventually, Lt. Col.) Gwido Langer.

When the first German military Enigma-enciphered messages were broadcast July 15, 1928, the Cipher Bureau's German section attempted unsuccessfully to decrypt them. Likely due to the successes of leading Polish mathematicians in breaking Russian ciphers during the Polish-Soviet War (1919-1921), a secret cryptology course was conducted in 1929 at Poznań University for selected mathematics students with a knowledge of the German language. Three participants in the course — Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski — were, three years later, hired by the Cipher Bureau.

Pokorny was third to lecture in the course, after engineer Antoni Palluth and then-Capt. Maksymilian Ciężki.

References

*Władysław Kozaczuk, "Enigma: How the German Machine Cipher Was Broken, and How It Was Read by the Allied in World War Two", edited and translated by Christopher Kasparek, Frederick, MD, University Publications of America, 1984, pp. 230, 246-47.