Underwater archeologists sponsored by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) have found an Enigma machine at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, likely from a submarine that Germany scuttled at the end of World War II.
The divers made the discovery while searching the sea bed using a sonar device for abandoned fishing nets that can be harmful for sea life.
Enigma machines, created in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, were used to encode military messages; these codes were finally broken by the experts assembled by the British at Bletchley Park, work which fueled the creation of modern computers.
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Earlier this year, a four-rotor M4 Enigma cipher machine sold at an auction for £347,250 ($437,955)[2]. It, however, was in pristine condition while the rusty, barnacle-covered one found in the Baltic Sea has been deformed by decades spent in salt water. Nonetheless, several keys remain intact and visible.
After Germany conceded WWII, the country ordered the navy to destroy remaining Enigmas so that Allied forces couldn't access them. After the war, Winston Churchill also ordered Enigmas to be destroyed to conceal lessons learned behind its programmable computer at Bletchley Park.
The M4 Enigmas were made for the German U-boat fleet after officials grew concerned over repeated Allied successes against the submarines. They were deployed to Germany's U-boat fleet in 1941 and prevented the Allies from knowing where German's U-boats were positioned for almost a year until English mathematician Alan Turing and, separately, Joe Desch in Dayton, Ohio developed the computer that broke M4 encryption to decipher German messages. It helped the Allies to gain control of the Atlantic sea.
The WWF-sponsored diving crew who found this Enigma