Index – Technology-Science – Mystery in the depths of the sea

German divers found a rare WWII German Enigma scrambler searching for spent fishing nets in the Baltic Sea, MTI reported. The frogmen first thought they had discovered a twisted typewriter in a fishing net deep in Gelting Bay, but the underwater archaeologist Florian Huber on the spot quickly realized the importance of the tool:

I have made many interesting and strange discoveries in the last twenty years, but I never thought that I would one day find a legendary Enigma machine.

Several movies have already been made about the WWII instrument, the most recent Code Game in 2014, which became an Oscar-winning play. At the time, the German army used the machine to send and receive secret messages, but British codebreakers cracked the code, gaining an advantage in the naval fight for control of the Atlantic. The British group that cracked the Enigma code, which the German military leadership believes to be indecipherable, was led by mathematician Alan Turing at the code-cracking center in Bletchley Park, that’s what the movie is about.

Before the end of the war, the crews of fifty 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, and the destruction of the scramblers it was part of the order.

We suspect this Enigma fell off one of the ships at this time.

Said Florian Huber, a representative for Submaris, a Kiel-based underwater research company.

The Enigma, more similar to a classic typewriter, was invented by the German electrical engineer Arthur Scheribus in 1918, and only much later, in 1926, did it begin to be used for military purposes. Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands were produced in Germany, only a few hundred survived. The legendary structure is very valuable, up to tens of thousands of euros will be auctioned for it. The newly found Enigma is delivered to the Archaeological Museum in Schleswig.