Eli5 how did the allies in ww2 decipher German enigma if there were millions of possibilities for letters and it was being changed every day?
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There are really good answers here, so I will just offer a very basic one.
With the exception of the German navy, often times security rules were ignored. People would start messages with the same thing every time. So allies could just look for those patterns which made it easy to decode. They were suppose to use something random at the beginning, but many ignored such rules and started the messages with the same thing each time. So once allies knew what works to try to look for, they could more easily decrypt the messages.
The navy however was much more strict about security which is why it was so much harder and the allies started building machines to try to decrypt them (Imitation game). All of this is likely more nuanced than I am saying, but for your EL5 version, it’s because the Germans did not always follow security protocol and used the same information at the start of every message.
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