The Swedish man who cracked Nazi Germany's code

In just two weeks during the summer of 1940, the 35-year-old mathematician Arne Beurling from Uppsala mysteriously cracked the sophisticated German Enigma machine G-type writer at a sign monitoring station at Karlaplan. After this groundbreaking task, Sweden could decipher up to 300,000 of the more or less top-secret messages that the Germans sent over Swedish telecommunications. Operation Barbarossa, or Germany's plans to attack the Soviet Union, were also revealed. Arne Beurling's performance is often described as the possibly foremost cryptographic achievement during the entire Second World War, and experts are still amazed by the mathematician's methodology.