A lost machine that gave allowance to the Nazis to sent secret messages has been discovered at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, as per reports. The Enigma machine allowed the users to write coded notes and also helped the leading officers of Hitler to send secure military commands. Copies of the machine were highly-razed by the Allies, who required its parts for decrypting the messages. The machines were featured heavily in a historical drama film from 2014 named The Imitation Game.
Decrypting the German intelligence was an important operation for code-breakers during the Second World War and it played a major role in getting the Allies on top. One of the machines has now been discovered by gobsmacked divers during an operation for protecting marine life from abandoned fishing nets.
Enigma Machine Discovered in Baltic Sea
The wartime technology was discovered resting on the seabed of the Baltic Sea. Gabriele Dederer from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) that hired the divers stated that it was a discovery unlike any other. "The WWF has been working for many years to rid the Baltic Sea of dangerous ghost nets. We regularly find larger objects on which the nets get tangled underwater. Such so-called 'hook points' are often tree trunks or stones. The Enigma is by far the most exciting historic find," she said as reported by the Daily Star.
The machine got recovered from the bottom of the Gelting Bay in northern Germany. It was discovered after Submaris, which is a company based in Kiel, used the side-viewing sonar technology for identifying the net it got caught in.
A diver with the Submaris named Florian Huber stated that the machine was most likely sent to the watery resting place in May 1945. During that month, 47 German U-boats were scuttled in the Gelting Bay. "We suspect that our Enigma went overboard in the course of this event," Huber said.
He mentioned that copies of the machine are now very rare and only a few of them are available at the German museums. "As an underwater archaeologist, I have already made many exciting and strange finds. However, I didn't dream that we would once find an Enigma machine. It was a grey November day I will not forget so soon," he added. The newly discovered Enigma machine has been sent to the restoration workshop at the Museum of Archaeology located in Schleswig for preservation and further examination.
