Enigma machine found at flea market

ROMANIA: Someone in Romania thought he’d made a fair amount of money when he sold an old typewriter for €100 at a flea market. He was wrong.

The ‘‘typewriter’’ was, in fact, a German Wehrmacht Enigma I, a World War II cipher machine, and the collector who bought it put it up for sale at Bucharest auction house Artmark with a starting price of €9000 (NZ$14,250). Yesterday, Artmark sold it to an online bidder for €45,000 ($71,350).

‘‘The collector bought it from a flea market. He’s a cryptography professor and ... he knew very well what he was buying,’’ said Cristian Gavrila, the collectible consignment manager at Artmark.

Romania was an ally of Nazi Germany until 1944, when it switched sides to join the Allies. Historians say the country may be home to many other cryptographic machines that have not yet been discovered.

Last month, Christie’s New York Books set a world auction record of US$547,500 with its sale of a ‘‘four-rotor Enigma cipher machine, 1944’’ to an online bidder.

Enigma machines were used to encode and decode messages sent by the various branches of the Nazi military, but British mathematician Alan Turing and his team at Britain’s wartime codebreaking centre, Bletchley Park, cracked the codes.

By some estimates, the Bletchley cryptologists’ work shortened the war by two years.

PHOTO: REUTERS An employee of the Artmark auction house in Bucharest demonstrates the original Enigma cipher machine, still in working condition, that a collector found at a flea market and resold for over $70,000.