Typewriter found at market sells as a £40,000 Enigma machine
AN OLD typewriter picked up for €100 (£88) at a Romanian flea market has gone under the hammer for €45,000 (£40,000), after it was discovered to be a Nazi-era Enigma machine used to send coded military messages.
It was spotted by a cryptography professor as he rifled through the market’s bric-a-brac. He took the German Wehrmacht Enigma 1 to Artmark, an auction house in Bucharest, which sold the piece to an anonymous buyer who had placed an online bid of €45,000.
Romania was an ally of Nazi Germany until 1944, when it switched sides. Historians say it may have many other machines not yet discovered.
Enigma machines allowed an operator to type in a message and then scramble it by means of three to five notched wheels displaying different letters of the alphabet. The receiver needed to know the exact settings of these rotors in order to reconstitute the coded text.
During the Second World War, they were used to encode and decode messages sent by the Nazi military, but the British mathematician Alan Turing and his team at Bletchley Park cracked the codes. By some estimates their work shortened the war by two years.
Most Enigma devices were destroyed by the Nazis as they progressed through Europe in the dying days of the Second World War. Roughly 100 M4 Enigma machines escaped the destruction, which makes them a highly sought-after by collectors.
Last month, an M4 Enigma machine was sold at auction in New York for a record-breaking price of $540,000 (£430,000).