Did Winston Churchill knowingly allow an orphanage/many orphans to get bombed so that Hitler would feel confident that the Allies had not [yet] cracked the Enigma machine?

by Dick_Saucer

Hello,

I recall years ago hearing or reading a story about Hitler suspecting that the Allies had cracked the Enigma code machine. Testing this, and Churchill, Hitler basically broadcast that the Luftwaffe was going to bomb either an orphanage or a site housing many orphans.

I now cannot find nearly any info about this online but swear that I have heard this story multiple times..

Can someone help me get to the bottom of this?

Many thanks in advance.

Bigglesworth_

The idea that Churchill allowed Coventry to be bombed has been around since the 1970s, and more recently The Imitation Game suggested that Alan Turing allowed a convoy to be attacked, though neither theory holds much water; see a previous answer of mine for some more details. In terms of suspicions of Enigma being broken, see another answer by /u/kieslowskifan for a fuller account. I've never heard of an orphanage being involved with Ultra intelligence, it sounds like the Coventry story becoming somewhat garbled in a more lurid version.