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Enigma Machine for Sale on eBay
RagingMaxx writes "An Italian antiques dealer has recently put to auction a mint condition, fully operational Enigma machine on eBay. The machine, dated circa 1938, will be sold to the highest bidder in just over a week, but after 30 hours of bidding the price has already surpassed $12,000 US. For those of you who can't afford the real thing, why not make your own?"
True, but at least a half dozen of them were successfully recovered by the Allies during the war. The movie U-571 is a dramatization of one of these successes, and the credits at the end of the movie list a number of other incidents where Enigmas were captured. No idea what happened to all of these though. My bet would be that either they ended up in museums or were destroyed after the war.
this page claims modern computers can crack an Enigma message in "a few minutes".
But a recent effort to crack some M4 messages using distributed computing estimated some 10,000 PC-hours to break a message.
While your post is correct about the film being a 'dramatisation', that film was some serious fiction. The Americans weren't even in the war when the first Enigmas were captured. The first capture of note [not an Enigma machine itself but something more vital] was grabbed from U110 by Sub-Lieutenant David Balme, aboard HMS Bulldog on the 9th May 1941 who was subsequently awarded a DSC for his actions. Before leaving the submarine, he grabbed a sealed envelope that contained the hyper-secret starting positions used by the Kriegsmarine.
This one looks like an Enigma 1 [Wermacht or Services Enigma]. They were also used by government and banks so this one could have been ex-government etc.
The important of cracking Enigma cannot ever be overstated. There is a general agreement amongst historians that the Allies ability to read the German's encrypted traffic shaved a couple of years off the war. I would encourage our American brethren to read the book 'Enigma:The Battle for the Code' by Simon Sebag-Montefiore. Its an exceptionally good and instructive read about the whole Enigma issue.
I would go as far and say that cracking Enigma prevented nuclear bombs over Europe. Nevertheless, the names of Rejewski, Turing and others have been forgotten or never known by the public. It's a shame.
THis place is _really_ worth a visit. The staff are all retired NSA staff and are glad to talk to you about the exhibits (now that the equipment is declassified!) They have an excellent exhibit on Cold War era supercomputers, with a Cray and a Connection Machine CM-5 on display.
Actually, it can be (and often is) overstated. The fascination with Enigma, among both the general public and the historians, often obscures (or fails to mention at all) the fact that the codebreaking effort was but one portion of the overall electronic intelligence effort. Especially in the Battle of the Atlantic where Huff-Duff and more conventional technques (like traffic analysis) yielded vast amounts of vital intelligence data.
Even with decrypted ciphertext, it always took considerable analysis to break the code(s) the messages used in the text for further security. (In the Atlantic the Allies, for example, never got a break like 'AF is short of fresh water'.)