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Divers Discover Nazi WW2 Enigma Machine in Baltic Sea (reuters.com) 48

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
German divers searching the Baltic Sea for discarded fishing nets have stumbled upon a rare Enigma cipher machine used by the Nazi military during World War Two which they believe was thrown overboard from a scuttled submarine. From a report: Thinking they had discovered a typewriter entangled in a net on the seabed of Gelting Bay, underwater archaeologist Florian Huber quickly realised the historical significance of the find. "I've made many exciting and strange discoveries in the past 20 years. But I never dreamt that we would one day find one of the legendary Enigma machines," said Huber. The Nazi military used the machines to send and receive secret messages during World War Two but British cryptographers cracked the code, helping the Allies gain an advantage in the naval struggle to control the Atlantic. At Bletchley Park codebreaking centre, a British team led by Alan Turing is credited with unravelling the code, shortening the war and saving many thousands of lives.
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Divers Discover Nazi WW2 Enigma Machine in Baltic Sea More

Divers Discover Nazi WW2 Enigma Machine in Baltic Sea

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  • How did it get there? (Score:5, Funny)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Friday December 04, 2020 @01:34PM (#60794398)
    It's an enigma...
    • a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

    • The enigma is how to discuss this seriously on Slashdot while getting past the lameness filter that disallows mention of N@zis or H1tler.

    • Must be the one James Bond threw off a cliff.

  • I'd like to know if it was the older 3-rotor or the newer 4-rotor model. The article doesn't say and the picture doesn't have that detail.

    However I don't think this one is in usable condition.

    • yes, the 3-rotor one isn't even "rare". But, seeing as it was found in the sea, and the navy used the 4-rotor one, maybe it is.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hey! ( 33014 )

        I believe that surface ships often used the three rotor version.

      • The submarines, in particular, used the 4-rotor variant.

        As the article states that it may have been cast off from a submarine, I'd expect that it is indeed a 4.

    • Re:Good find (Score:4, Funny)

      by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Friday December 04, 2020 @02:52PM (#60794684)

      I always use rotor-13!

    • Re:Good find (Score:4, Informative)

      by olsmeister ( 1488789 ) on Friday December 04, 2020 @02:57PM (#60794718)
      Naval historian Jann Witt from the German Naval Association told DPA that he believes the machine, which has three rotors, was thrown overboard from a German warship in the final days of the war.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        It probably was - there were orders that sensitive things like Enigma machines were to be destroyed or dumped before capture or surrender. Obviously on a ship you can dump it overboard, but on a submarine you have to destroy it. It's why even though the machines aren't "rare", 4 rotor ones are extremely so as I'd expect the navy to have destroyed or thrown overboard a lot of them prior to surrender.

        On land, there probably isn't as much time to destroy if the enemies came overrunning your camp, which explain

  • Last message encoded: (Score:5, Funny)

    by fropenn ( 1116699 ) on Friday December 04, 2020 @01:41PM (#60794432)
    "Everything going well here on the Submarine Aaargh."

  • 3-rotor is fairly common (Score:5, Informative)

    by DaChesserCat ( 594136 ) on Friday December 04, 2020 @01:45PM (#60794440) Journal
    A couple years ago, I paid a visit to the National Cryptologic Museum [nsa.gov] near Washington, DC. They had a pair of 3-rotor Enigmas setup, powered up, etc. so you could play with them.

    The 4-rotor variety ... yeah, those were rare. And they were in wide use at the end of WW II. Ergo, I'd guess that what they found was a 4-rotor, considering the late stage in the war and the comments about how rare it is.

  • This should be a big help - hopefully now we'll finally be able to beat those darn Nazis!

    • You know, maybe Slashdot's lameness filter should check to see if the posted story to which people are responding is actually about Nazis before it flags these comments...

      • You know, maybe Slashdot's lameness filter should check to see if the posted story to which people are responding is actually about Nazis before it flags these comments...

        I have to say, the "lameness filter" seems to be broken. I tried to post a comment mentioning that it was three Polish mathematicians who actually broke the Enigma code, and the Slashdot comment system said it didn't pass the lameness filter and wouldn't post. I tried about a dozen variant phrasings to see if I could figure out what word was causing the post to be labelled "lame" (Polish? Turing? Mathematician? Broke?), but the best I could do was post the links with no commentary.

  • I find it hard to believe it would survive, exposed on the seabed.
    And making a replica and leaving it on the seabed would not be too hard, but would make it worth a lot more than a replica.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • One would assume they are going to sell it, and it could reach around $800,000.

        I'm not saying they did fake it, it just seemed surprising that it was found, relatively intact.

    • I find it hard to believe it would survive, exposed on the seabed.

      Depends where and how deep.

      Shallow warm water gives you a lot of corrosion. If it were deep in the north Atlantic, though, the corrosion is not very bad.

  • more so, they social engineered it....

      • Re:and it was the Poles, not the Brits (Score:5, Informative)

        by hackertourist ( 2202674 ) on Friday December 04, 2020 @03:04PM (#60794772)

        The Poles were the first to systematically break Enigma, they figured out the Enigma's internals and built the first mechanical means to crack Enigma messages.
        At the outbreak of WW2, this work was transferred to the UK. The next steps were Britsh developments: they kept up with new developments like new rotors and new coding practices. They developed the rudimentary mechanical devices into the bombe, which allowed analysts to quickly check a large number of possible Enigma settings given a crib (a guess of what a particular bit of ciphertext could be). They broke the 4-rotor Naval Enigma when that came out. Turing was instrumental in both achievements.

        TFA's claim of "a British team led by Alan Turing" is accurate in the sense that Turing developed crucial techniques. He didn't lead the team in the formal sense though (at least not for long) - he wasn't cut out to be a manager, and was better in the role he adopted: tackling the hard problems himself rather than leading a team. By 1942, he had switched from Enigma to the Lorenz cipher.

  • "a British team led by Alan Turing is credited with unravelling the code, shortening the war and saving many thousands of lives."

    Yep! Then in truly humanistic fashion we basically fucked him him over after that.

    "Faced with the prospect of imprisonment, and perhaps with it the loss of the mathematics post he held at Manchester University, which gave him access to one of the world's only computers, Turing accepted the alternative of "chemical castration" - hormone treatment that was supposed to suppress his

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Geoffrey.landis ( 926948 )

      "a British team led by Alan Turing is credited with unravelling the code, shortening the war and saving many thousands of lives."

      Yes, "credited with" is correct. The code was actually broken by three Polish mathematicians, who gave their work to the British when the Germans invaded Poland, but because everything was kept top secret-- both in the UK and in Poland-- they never got the credit they should have been due.

      The British extended their work to the more and more sophisticated Enigmas that the Germans developed, but it was the Poles, not the Brits, who broke the code first.

  • Read this from a comment on reddit, the message that was on the device, "drink more Ova..."

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