Nazi ‘Enigma’ Machine Found at the Bottom of the Baltic Sea
By Stephanie Pappas | Live Science Contributor

December 7, 2020 | Divers trying to remove old fishing nets from the Baltic sea have accidentally stumbled on a Nazi code-making machine.

Nazis may have tossed this code-making machine overboard during WWII.
(Image: © Florian Huber/WWF)

The Enigma machine, as it’s called, looks a bit like a typewriter. In fact, the diver who found the device on the ocean floor initially thought that’s what the artifact was, according to AFP. But the diving team, on assignment for the conservation group World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), quickly realized that they had something much stranger.

During World War II, Enigma machines were used to encode German military messages, in hopes of preventing Allied powers from learning about troop movements and other plans. The devices consisted of a keyboard and a series of rotors that did the encoding. The rotors substituted different letters for the ones typed in; different Enigma machines used between three and eight rotors, which moved independently after each keystroke so that the same initial letter typed into the machine would appear as multiple different letters in the final code.