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German divers searching for discarded fishing nets in the Baltic Sea have come across a rare Enigma cipher machine used by the Nazi army during World War II that they believe was thrown overboard from a sunken submarine.
Thinking that they had discovered a typewriter entangled in a net on the Gelting Bay seabed, underwater archaeologist Florian Huber quickly realized the historical significance of the find.
“I have made many exciting and strange discoveries in the last 20 years. But I never dreamed that one day we would find one of the legendary Enigma machines,” Huber said.
The machines were used by the Nazi army to send and receive secret messages during the war, but British cryptographers cracked the code, helping the Allies gain an advantage in the naval fight for control of the Atlantic.
At the Bletchley Park code-breaking center, a British team led by Alan Turing is credited with unraveling the code, shortening the war, and saving many thousands of lives.
Shortly before Germany’s surrender in May 1945, the crews of some 50 submarines, or U-Boots, followed an order to sink their ships in Gelting Bay, near the Danish border, to avoid turning them over to the Allies.
Destruction of the encryption devices was part of the order.
“We suspect that our Enigma went overboard in the course of this event,” said Mr. Huber of the Kiel-based company Submaris, which leads underwater research missions.
Overall, the Germans sank more than 200 of their submarines in the North and Baltic Seas at the end of the war.
The Enigma device, which looks like a typewriter, consisted of a keyboard and wheels that encoded messages.
Although several hundred thousand machines were produced, only a few hundred are known to exist. They are sold at auction for tens of thousands of euros.
The find, made by divers working on behalf of WWF with the aim of finding abandoned fishing nets that endanger marine life, will be handed over to the Schleswig museum of archeology.
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