Original WWII Enigma machine for sale on eBay
By Evan Blass 
posted March 30th 2006 11:50AM
posted March 30th 2006 11:50AM
In
the same way that serial killer memorabilia has found a macabre secondary market online, artifacts from World World II
era Nazi Germany also hold great value to certain collectors. One of the most famous elements of the Nazi war effort
was the Enigma electrical cryptography machine, which was adopted by the Germans in 1925 after they discovered how
easily the British cracked their codes in World War I, and a rare example of which is now for sale on eBay for almost
$16,000 as of this writing. The Enigma improved on older monoalphabetic ciphers (where letters are exchanged in a
one-to-one fashion throughout a piece of text) by altering the cipher each time a new letter was encoded, giving the
machine over 10,000,000,000,000,000 possible keys. Recently two out of three Enigma-encrypted Nazi communications that
surfaced in 1995 were cracked within weeks of each other using Folding@Home-style volunteer distributed computing to
examine the billions of possible iterations.
You're all so nieve... "It's Nazi" --- oh my god.....
It's a posh typewriter ^^ would you object against a typewriter being sold, just because it was made in germany in 1941?
I don't think so.
This is just another case of what is evil - the gun, or the person who fires the gun. The Enigma machine? or the messages it was used to write. Go figure. I think it is fine to sell this...
Polish mathematicians broke Enima code! Not Britishy and them American all movies and other publications are a fiction!
The Polish did fabulous work against the Enigma and this is well recognized. The task of breaking Enigma messages became ever harder, the Poles were eventually crushed between Russia and Germany and the Allies continued the work - UK was already breaking into the Commercial Enigma traffic. To break the Military's Enigma in a regular and timely fashion required organizations like Bletchley Park (eventually 9600 people in and around there) plus the Intercept stations. The M4 Kriegsmarine Enigma would have outstripped the resources of the Polish codebreakers - even though they probably had the skills to do it.
Please look at #5. That entry is most encompassing re Enigma. This #5 has history about the machine going back to the 1920's. See for yourself!
battle of wounded knee anyone??????????????????
you people are the most hatred-filled, ignorant idiots that i have had the misfortune to cross paths with. i work at the thales company which is the successor to the c. lorenz company which produced the enigma machines. they now produce military communications equipment and portable perimeter radar that is supplied to the whole world. we are using german aircraft to bomb the citizens of afghanistan and iraq due to their superior performance. the united states was as anti-semetic as the rest of the world was.
we even refused to bomb the train tracks leading to auschwitz when requested to do so, thus enabling the transport of jews to the camp. we allied ourselves to stalin who killed over 23 million people many jews. and we conducted war against hitler. one is good, the other evil. how does this compute. so get off of your high horse, use your brain. history is history. ask the native american indians. ask the victims of the crusades, americans committed genocide also. as has the entire human population. this is not a german thing, this is a human kind event. we are all capable of evil and we have all committed evil, it lurks within all of us. dont ever forget it.
i live in a small town that was completely destroyed by the british airforce days before the war was ended. they killed 18,000 citizens of a total population of 23,000 and destroyed the entire town in 25 minutes. it was not a military target.
i am an american living and working in germany. germans are not nazis. nazis are nazis. just as everyone in america in the 1850's didnt want to exterminate the american indian, just 95% of them did.
and who gives a shit if someone sells a piece of history. it happens all the time. how many americans are profiting from the loss of the american indians. give up your land and give it all back, get on the boat and take your ass back to europe or wherever you came from.
or shut up.
haha. you know its funny that ppl will freak out about this machine being on ebay but no one gets pissed off at the I.B.M. computers on ebay.geeze I.B.M. created and did monthly servicing of the registration punch card systems used to classify and process the jews,gypsies and every other person that went through a concentration camp in WW2.THINK ABOUT IT PEOPLE.ITS HISTORY AND ITS WORTH OWNING A PIECE OF IF YOU CAN AFFORD IT. cheerio
but its okay for uncle joe to murder 20 million kulaks???
personally i would say this item is a very difinative and historically important relic of world war two. It marks a precise turning point in that terrifying conflict of total war of wich the world will never see the likes of again. Just for the record it was in fact due to the couragious effort of British forces(not American forces as the latest propagander movie from the States would suggest) that one of these machines was captured initially from a Uboat and subsequently decoded resulting in considerable strategic advantages over Germany.
Has such i would imagine anyone who collects WW2 militaria would deffinately give it considerable pride of place within his/ her collection.