“Enigma”: They find a Nazi encryption machine at the bottom of the sea

A machine Enigma, the legendary modelor used by the Nazis during WWII to encrypt information, recently discovered in the Baltic Sea, was handed over on Friday to a German specialist department for restoration.

This portable electromechanical machine, The subject of many films and detective novels for decades, it must first be desalted before being restored by the National Archaeological Museum Schlsewig-Holstein.

“We assume it will take about a year “, said the head of the regional archaeological service, Ulf Ickerodt, who plans to exhibit it later in a museum.

A team of NGOs for the conservation of the environment WWF, who was on a mission to clean the seabed from fishing nets, found the machine in November off the coast of that state, Germany’s most northerly, at Gelting Bay, across from Denmark.

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Underwater archaeologist Florian Huber explained that on that day one of his colleagues said on the ship’s deck: “There is a net over there, but there is an old typewriter hanging on it. . “

According to naval historian Jann M. Witt, this Enigma machine found in Gelting Bay it was reportedly dropped by a German warship towards the end of the conflict. He explains that the machine found only had three rollers, while those used in Nazi submarines had four. “The Enigma is a thing of the past in many ways,” Ickerodt explained.

This machine invented by the German Arthur Scherbius at the end of the 1910s, The ancestor of modern encryption, it reached its peak under the Third Reich, used by the Nazis and their allies to encrypt and decrypt sensitive information.

This model had a reputation for being impenetrable, according to its creators, until British computer scientist Alan Turing managed to crack the secret code of the German Navy.

His action had a considerable influence on submarine warfare in the Atlantic because, from then on, the British could “read” the encrypted radio codes of German ships, without the enemy noticing.