It wasn't a nonce as such - it was a key exchange, slightly more like a salt in modern terms.
One of the main failings of the Germans was their love of formal introductions and sign offs in official messages, especially by the navy which otherwise had rather better crypto than the other branches. However if you are already stuck with a language that has a very fixed word and sentence structure you don't help by signing all your messages with the same 40 character long formal greeting.
It wasn't a nonce as such - it was a key exchange, slightly more like a salt in modern terms.
The way we think about ciphers has almost completely changed with the advent of cheap computation. Also, I read that book in High School and haven't thought much about Enigma in about 16 years, so it's entirely possible I got that a bit wrong.
However if you are already stuck with a language that has a very fixed word and sentence structure you don't help by signing all your messages with the same 40 character long formal greeting.
So, if you want to keep secrets, it doesn't pay to have a stick up your...
Another way to put it: it pays to be more like Snoop Dogg and less like Colonel Klink.
One of the main failings of the Germans was their love of formal introductions and sign offs in official messages, especially by the navy which otherwise had rather better crypto than the other branches. However if you are already stuck with a language that has a very fixed word and sentence structure you don't help by signing all your messages with the same 40 character long formal greeting.