Divers find Nazis’ Enigma code machine in Baltic Sea
- The machine was found in the Bay of Gelting in northeast Germany, by divers on assignment for environmental group WWF
- A naval historian said he believes the machine was thrown overboard from a German warship
German divers who recently fished an Enigma encryption machine out of the Baltic Sea, used by the Nazis to send coded messages during World War II, handed their rare find over to a museum for restoration on Friday.
The legendary code machine was discovered last month during a search for abandoned fishing nets in the Bay of Gelting in northeast Germany, by divers on assignment for environmental group WWF.
“A colleague swam up and said: there’s a net there with an old typewriter in it,” Florian Huber, the lead diver, told the DPA news agency.
The team quickly realised they had stumbled across a historic artefact and alerted the authorities.
Ulf Ickerodt, head of the state archaeological office in Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein region, said the machine would be restored by experts at the state’s archaeology museum.
The delicate process, including a thorough desalination process after seven decades in the Baltic seabed, “will take about a year”, he said.