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Tuesday, December 1, 2020
“By far the most exciting find”
WWF searches for ghost networks and finds Enigma
WWF ecologists continue to search for abandoned fishing nets at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. By chance they find a century: in Geltinger Bucht they come across an encryption machine from the Second World War.
On behalf of the nature conservation organization WWF, they were supposed to recover ghost nets in the Baltic Sea; Instead, they made a sensational little find: In Geltinger Bay, research divers from Kiel’s Submaris company found a World War II Enigma cipher machine, as the WWF (World Fund for Nature) announced. It was “by far the most exciting historical find we have ever had,” said WWF consultant Gabriele Dederer.
Using so-called side-view sonar, the divers searched the seabed for abandoned fishing nets, so-called ghost nets, WWF explained. As they did so, they came across the Enigma machine: a net had snagged on it.
Rest of the sinking campaign?
The cipher machine apparently landed at Geltinger Bucht, east of Flensburg, when the German Navy undertook a full-scale self-sinking operation there in the final days of WWII to prevent some 50 submarines from being handed over to the Allies. . “We suspect that our Enigma went overboard in the course of this event,” explained Florian Huber, an underwater archaeologist and diver with Submaris.
It happens time and again that divers equipped with modern technology, who are supposed to rid the seas of ghost nets on behalf of WWF, find larger objects, Dederer explained. Objects of historical importance like the Enigma are rare. In such cases, the WWF collaborates with the state offices of archeology and the munitions recovery service of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Schleswig-Holstein.
Geltinger Bucht’s Enigma machine is now in the restoration workshop of the Schleswig Museum of Archeology. There it should be further examined and preserved.
During World War II, the German Wehrmacht encrypted its radio messages with the help of the Enigma. Today, encryption machines are considered rarities. The success of British mathematicians in cracking the German encryption method was filmed in the Oscar-winning film “The Imitation Game” with Benedict Cumberbatch.
