
The Enigma, because it is what we are talking about, was fished out from the Baltic Sea and transferred to the museum for the necessary conservation works. Interestingly, however, this was not the purpose of the work of the divers who, commissioned by the WWF environmental group, scoured the sea in the vicinity of Gelting Bay in search of abandoned fishing nets. - A colleague swam and said: there is a net with an old typewriter - says the leader of the divers Florian Huber in an interview with the DPA agency. It quickly turned out that they had stumbled upon a unique specimen, which they had rightly identified as a historical artifact, and immediately notified the appropriate authorities.
Only that it was not a typewriter, but an Enigma, one of those encryption machines used by the Germans during World War II that kept the Allies awake at night. Jann Witt of the German Naval Association suggests that it is an Egyptian shipmaker most likely thrown overboard of a German warship during the last days of the war, because famous Nazi submarines used newer and more complex 4-rotor models. Nevertheless, the find is still impressive, because although some copies have survived to this day, when a piece appears at an auction, it quickly sells for a lot of money, reaching 150-350 thousand dollars.
We also have several copies in our country, one of which operates in the National Museum of Technology in Warsaw. The Enigma retrieved from the Baltic Sea, however, is not in the best condition and requires a lot of restoration work. According to the head of the state archaeological office of the Schleswig-Holstein region, Ulf Ickerodt, the machine will be restored by experts from the national museum, but it is a very delicate process, especially desalination after 70 years in the Baltic Sea, so it will certainly take about a year.
Later, the machine will be on display in the museum, admiring the achievements of famous scientists who managed to break it. And although the person of Alan Turing, called the father of artificial intelligence and modern computers, is most often mentioned in this context, the participation of a team of Arts and Cinema cryptologists, i.e. Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki, cannot be forgotten.