German divers who acquired an enigma encryption machine from the Baltic Sea have donated their rare find to the museum for restoration.
The code machine – which the Nazis used to send coded messages during World War II – was discovered last month by a variety on the assignment for the environmental group WWF. The group was in search of abandoned fishing in the Gulf of Gelting off the northeast coast of Germany.
“A colleague swam and said: It has an old typewriter, there’s a lattice,” Florian Huber, lead diver, told the DPA news agency.
The team quickly realized they had stumbled upon a historic artifact and alerted authorities.
The machine will be re-installed by experts from the state’s archaeological museum, said Dr. Elf Icrode, head of the State Archaeological Office in Schleswig-Holstein.
“After seven decades on the Baltic coast, the delicate process, including the complete desalination process, will take about a year,” he said.
After that, the machine will go on display in the museum.
The historian of the German Naval Association, Dr. Jane Witt told the DPA that they believe the machine, which has three rotors, was thrown overboard from a German warship in the final days of the war.
That said, it is less likely to come from a submarine, as Adolf Hitler’s U-boats use more complex four-rotor enigma machines.
Allied forces worked tirelessly to decrypt the code produced by the Enigma machine, which changes every 24 hours.
The British mathematician Lan Lan Turing, seen as the father of modern computing, led a team in Blechley Park, Britain, in 1941 to break this code.
With this success the Allies explained the crucial radio messages about the movements of the German army. Historians believe he shortened the war by almost two years.
