Arte - The Man who Cracked the Nazi Code (2015)

What if the D-Day landings were only possible thanks to a chess player who cracked the encoded communications of the German army? 6 June 1944. D-Day. The biggest land and sea operation in history 256,000 men, 20,000 vehicles and 4,000 landing craft. On this pivotal moment in history when the outcome of the Second World War was at stake, much has been written, recounted, analyzed, examined, filmed and filmed again. And yet, what if I told you the D-Day landings were only possible thanks to a socially-awkward, antimilitarist mathematician whose dream was to build an artificial brain? Far-fetched? Let's add that this crazy dream, besides bringing a halt to Hitler's plans, gave rise to modern computer science. The dreamer in question was Alan Turing and his field was the most fundamental branch of mathematics logic. How could someone who lived in the realm of ideas have had such an impact on history and the world? Without a doubt, Alan Turing was one of the boldest scientific minds of the twentieth century. A brilliant mathematician and a long-forgotten hero of the Second World War, he contributed to the Allies' victory by cracking the encrypted Nazi codes, and as a result, he prepared the way for the D-Day landings. Indisputably, a true pioneer of computing, he was the one who wrote some of the first computer programs and the inventor of the artificial intelligence concept. In this fascinating documentation of English Alan Turing's incredible story, we will take a glimpse inside his extraordinary, brimming with speculations and abstract notions brain, to see how the genius, yet unfortunate logician and cryptanalyst played a major part in the glorious history of WWII by shortening the war's duration by two years. The unlikely trajectory of this genius, entwined despite himself with world events, will allow us to take a fresh look at a whole section of the history of the Second World War, and discover that a close link exists between the Allied victory and the invention of the computer. How could a single man's ideas have such a tremendous impact on history's course?

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