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German divers searching for worn fishing nets found a rare WWII German coding machine in the Baltic Sea.
It was first thought that a typewriter coiled in a fishing net had been discovered deep in Gelting Bay, but underwater archaeologist Florian Huber quickly realized the historical significance of the tool.
“I have made many interesting and strange discoveries in the last 20 years. But I never thought I would one day find a legendary Enigma machine. “ Huber said.
The Nazi military machine used the Enigmas to send and receive secret messages during World War II, but British codebreakers cracked the code, helping the Allies gain supremacy in the naval fight for control of the Atlantic. The British group that cracked the Enigma code, which the German military leaders considered unbreakable, was led by mathematician Alan Turing at the code-cracking center in Bletchley Park.
Shortly before the end of the war, the crews of some 50 German submarines were ordered to sink their ships in Gelting Bay, near the Danish border, so that they could not fall into the hands of the Allied forces. Destroying the encoders was also part of the command.
“We suspect this Enigma fell off one of the ships at this time.” Said Huber, a representative for Submaris, a Kiel-based underwater research company.
The Germans sank more than 200 submarines in the North Atlantic and the Baltic Sea at the end of the war.
The Enigma-type typewriter was invented in 1918 by Arthur Scheribus, a German electrical engineer, and was used for military purposes in 1926. Hundreds of thousands were made in Germany, but only a few hundred survived. Auctions change hands for tens of thousands of euros.
More recently, at the Dorotheum auction house auction in Vienna in June, such a machine sold for roughly four times the estimated price, 117,800 euros (40.6 million guilders).
The Enigma found in the Baltic Sea is delivered to the Archaeological Museum in Schleswig.
Cover photo illustration.
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