Nazi Enigma machine raised from the deep
A wartime Enigma cipher machine has been found on the seabed in the Baltic, snarled up in an old fishing net.
It is thought to have been thrown into the sea in the days before Nazi Germany’s surrender in May 1945, when dozens of U-boats were scuttled in Gelting Bay, near the Danish border, so that they would not fall into Allied hands.
The machine was spotted by German divers working for the environmental group WWF to locate ‘‘ghost nets’’ discarded by trawlers. They were surveying the waters from a catamaran when their sonar system picked up an unusual signal.
The rusted machine they found appeared at first to be a typewriter.
Its significance realised later.
The Enigma devices formed the backbone of Nazi military cryptography during World War II but few have survived.
Some fetch more than $757,000 at auction. In 1943, codebreakers at Bletchley Park cracked the ciphers.
After Hitler’s suicide on April 30, 1945, his successor Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz ordered naval vessels that could not be adapted to civilian life to be scuttled and their cipher machines destroyed or thrown into the sea. was only
The order was rescinded days later but not before 47 U-boats and a destroyer were sunk in the bay.
The Enigma machine now belongs to the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, in whose waters it was found, and will be restored at the archaeology museum in the Schloss Gottorf palace, Schleswig.
‘‘We’ve been working on ridding the Baltic of these dangerous ghost nets for many years,’’ Gabriele Dederer, of the WWF, said.
‘‘We frequently find larger objects in the nets. Often these socalled hook points are tree trunks or stones.
‘‘But the Enigma is in historical terms by far the most exciting.’’ – The Times