Sold for £9.50 on eBay, the Nazi code machine
IT may only look like a battered old typewriter – and was sold for just £9.50 on eBay.
But the device turned out to be a vital part of a rare Lorenz SZ42 machine used to send messages from Adolf Hitler to his Nazi top brass.
The machine – codenamed Tunny by the Bletchley Park scientists who battled to crack its code – had spent years among junk in a shed in Southend, Essex.
Staff at the National Museum of Computing in Buckinghamshire spotted the machine, called a teleprinter, for sale on the auction website and visited its owner to investigate.
Volunteer engineer John Whetter said: ‘We said “Thank you very much, how much was it again?” She said “£9.50”, so we said “Here’s a £10 note – keep the change!”’
The device, found under rubbish in its original case, is thought to be worth thousands of pounds. The more famous, but less sophisticated Enigma machine recently sold at auction house Bonhams for £249,000.
During the war, the teleprinter – which transmitted radio signals – was used to enter plain messages in German, which were then encoded using a cipher machine which had 12 individual wheels with variable settings.
The museum is now on the hunt for the motor, another key piece of the Lorenz.