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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?"
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.