Pieces of the formidable machine reserved for the most strategic communications between the Führer and his generals were found off a Polish coast. Probably in an old German communications post.
A Polish research group has found fragments of an Enigma machine, an encryption device used by Nazi Germany to encode messages. At the beginning of 1945, faced with the imminent fall of the Nazi state, most of the German troops and civilians from Gdańsk, in the far north of Poland, were exfiltrated by sea. The island of Sobieszewo, in a few kilometers east of the city, was one of these evacuation points. The place is today the subject of excavations.
In November, the Nature Conservation Authority, the owner of the area and the Gdańsk Forest District carry out « routine work » on the island, says a member of the Latebra Foundation. The discovery was made by Magda, another member of the association who recently participated in the research. « I was walking with the detector and heard a sound I had never heard before. I thought it was some kind of explosive whose signal I didn't know before »she says. After asking his colleagues for help in digging a hole, « we found the Enigma drum ».
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Field telephones, broadcasting equipment and laryngophones used in German tanks were also found. One of the members of the board of directors of the Latebra Foundation believes that the place of discovery was probably at the time a communications post for retreating German troops.
Considerable influence during the War
This formidable machine invented by the German Arthur Scherbius at the end of the 1910s, ancestor of modern encryption, had its hour of glory under the IIIe Reich. It was used by the Nazis and their allies to encrypt and decrypt sensitive information. An inviolable tool, until British computer scientist Alan Turing found the secret code of the German navy. His action had a considerable influence on submarine warfare in the Atlantic because from then on the British could “lire» the encrypted radio codes of German boats – without the enemy noticing.
