An amateur German cryptographer has managed to successfully compete against a World War Two code-breaking machine to decrypt data.

Amateur cryptographer Joachim Schuth, who used software he had designed specially, raced against the rebuilt “Colossus” to complete his task.

The replica of the World War Two code-breaking Colossus computer was built by the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park in the U.K.

Bletchley Park was the spy centre where scientists intercepted and decrypted enemy messages during World War Two.

The rebuilding of Colossus took 14 years, in part because the original machines and their plans were destroyed after the war to keep the project secret.

The only details the team had to work with were 10 photographs, a few pages of circuit diagrams that had been kept illegally and a paper from the machine's creator Dr Tommy Flowers.

The Colossus machine revealed to allied military sources the movement of enemy troops, the state of their supplies, state of ammunition, numbers of dead soldiers and other vitally important information for the whole of the second part of the War.