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The legendary code machine was discovered last month searching for abandoned fishing nets in Gelting Bay in northeastern Germany.
“A colleague came in and said there is a network with an old typewriter,” chief diver Florian Huber told DPA, writes Science Alert.
Enigma found at the bottom of the Baltic Sea
However, the team quickly realized that they had discovered an important historical object by chance and warned those responsible.
Ulf Ickerodt, head of the state archaeological service in the Schleswig-Holstein region of Germany, said the machine would be restored by experts from the regional archaeological museum.
The delicate process, which includes a full desalination process after seven decades at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, will take about a year, Ickerodt said. After that, Enigma will be exhibited in the museum.
Naval historian Jann Witt, from the German Navy Association DPA, said he believed the machine had been dropped from a German warship in the last days of the war. It is much less likely that it was thrown from the submarine, as the find had three rotors, while Adolf Hitler’s U-bots used more sophisticated four-rotor Enigma machines.
The allied forces relentlessly tried to decipher the codes generated by Enigma, which were changed every 24 hours. British mathematician Alan Turing, considered the father of modern computing, led the so-called British team “Bleach Park”, which in 1941 broke the code.
The advance helped the Allies decipher key radio messages about the movements of German military units. Historians say it shortened the war by about two years.
The full story was screened in 2014 on The Imitation Game, starring Oscar-nominated British actor Benedict Cumberbatch.
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