Scientists accidentally discovered an Enigma cipher machine on the bottom of the Baltic Sea. The Nazis used it to encrypt secret military information during World War II to prevent the Allies from deciphering it.
The group of divers accidentally discovered the Enigma machine. Photo: Submaris
During a recent expedition, a group of German divers from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) scoured the Baltic Sea to remove drifting fishing nets that could potentially trap fish, birds and other species. Other marine mammals are trapped. These nets are often difficult to see with the naked eye. Fishermen have intentionally discarded them when damaged or accidentally lost in the process of fishing in the ocean.
Interestingly, the search team suddenly discovered a rusty, moss-covered but relatively intact object in Gelting Bay, northeast Germany. “A colleague of mine came out of the water and said, ‘There’s an old typewriter stuck in a fishing surf,'” said Florian Huber, the team’s principal diver.
After careful analysis, the team realized that the typewriter-like device was essentially a very rare Nazi Enigma cipher machine. During World War II, Nazi Germany used the Enigma machine to encrypt military messages, hoping to prevent the Allied powers from knowing about German troop movements and other plans. .
“I have made many interesting and strange discoveries over the past 20 years. But I never thought I would one day find one of the legendary Enigma machines,” Huber said.
The Enigma machine consists of a keyboard and a series of rotors that do the encoding work. The rotor is responsible for replacing new letters for each letter typed. Different Enigma machines use three to eight rotors. They move independently of each other after each keystroke so that the same initial letter entered into the machine appears as many different letters in the final code.
The receiver who wants to decode the message needs to know the starting position of the rotors. After the encrypted message is entered into the Enigma machine with the appropriate configuration, the machine will extract the original text.
The Enigma machine on the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Photo: Submaris
Huber believes that the Enigma cipher machine was destroyed by being thrown into the sea to protect military secrets just before Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies in May 1945. Around the same time, the German Navy deliberately sank more than 50 of its U-boats in Gelting Bay so that they would not fall into Allied hands.
“The Enigma machine that the WWF dive team found at the bottom of Gelting Bay was a three-rotor model. It can be thrown into the sea from an ordinary warship, not a submarine. Because Nazi U-boats often used more high-tech four-rotor machines,” said historian Jann Witt of the German Naval Association.
Although the Enigma machines for a long time allowed the Nazi army to keep the location and plan of attack a secret, the Allies later successfully cracked the Enigma cipher.
The Polish Cryptography Service consisting of mathematicians Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki made the first attempts in 1939 to reconstruct a model of the Enigma machine, explaining how it worked and decode multiple messages. They then turned over this information to British intelligence, because the Germans changed their codes every day making it harder for them to decipher the message.
A team of British mathematicians and scientists – led by Alan Turing – finally figured out how to decode the Nazi Enigma messages in 1941. Cracking these ciphers was of great significance. important, helping Allied ships evade numerous attacks from German U-boats [infamous submarines that sank more than 5,000 battleships in World War I and more than 2,700 battleships in World War II] , while helping the Allies gain an advantage in sea warfare and control the Atlantic. Some historians believe that the Allied intelligence advantage contributed to shortening the Second World War by several years.
Today, Alan Turing is recognized as the founder of modern computer science. We can know more about his life and process of deciphering the Enigma code through the famous movie “The Imitation Game” which was released in 2014.
Germany produced about 20,000 Enigma machines in the 1930s and 1940s, but only a handful of these survive today. This makes them a highly valued collector’s item. In 2017, a mathematician in Romania sold an Enigma machine with three rotors for $51,620. Meanwhile, the Enigmas movement with four rotors has sold for up to $400,000 at major auctions.
After discovering the cryptographic machine on the seabed, the WWF team of divers handed it over to the archaeological office of the state of Schleswig-Holstein (Germany). “Here, experts will p
