German divers accidentally found an Enigma coding machine at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. They found the device working on behalf of the World Wildlife Fund to remove abandoned fishing nets from the water.
Initially, the divers thought it was a simple typewriter, until an underwater archaeologist realized how special the find was. Nazi Germany used the Enigma to exchange secret messages. Many thousands were made, but because the device was top secret, they are rare today. Collectors pay tens of thousands of euros for it.
“In the 20 years that I have been diving, I have found many exciting and strange things, but I never dreamed that I would one day show up such a legendary Enigma machine,” Florian Huber told Reuters news agency.
End of the Third Reich
Huber suspects that the Enigma was deliberately thrown overboard in 1945. At the end of the war, German captains were ordered en masse to sink their submarines to prevent them from falling into Allied hands. The Enigma had to be destroyed in the process.
In Geltingbaai, where the Enigma was found, about fifty submarines were sunk on May 5, 1945. The bay is close to the picture of Flensburg, where the last remnants of the Nazi government was seated after the fall of Berlin and the death of Hitler.
–