Editor’s Note
This article reports on the recent auction of a rare 1944 Enigma cipher machine, a device central to WWII history. The text has been edited for clarity and brevity.
A 1944 Nazi German Enigma coding machine sold this week for £305,000 in a London auction.
Bonhams sold the device in their Science, Technology & Natural History sale that closed with live bidding in Knightsbridge on Tuesday, September 9.
The machine is an AG M4 Enigma cipher machine made by Olympia Büromaschinenwerke in 1944.
Enigma ciphers were vital to the German war effort, and breaking their codes was a major, multinational, multiyear success story for the Allies.
The code breakers in Poland, and then in Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, used captured machines to unravel the multi-level, mechanical puzzle that produced coded radio messages for the Nazi military.
The machines were complex, cutting edge technology of their time. Captured Enigma ciphers were used in code breaking. Some went on to serve other states after the Second World War. German service men destroyed any device they feared would fall into Allied hands.
This low survival rate, and their historic and technological importance (breaking the codes helped produce important innovations in the development of computing) has made Enigma machines much sought-after collector’s pieces. Many are in museum collections. Bonhams say just 80 examples of this M4 type are known to survive.
It was sold with a large set of extras, including the rotors that produced the code, cables, spare parts and printed instructions for the user, all in a lockable wooden case with key.
It is also a historically significant example, made because the German navy feared their codes might be being cracked.
Enigma predated the Second World War. The machines were invented by Arthur Scherbius just after the First World War, and were originally sold to keep business messages secret.
The German armed forces used them from 1926, with each branch of the services developing their own systems.
The M4 was made from 1941 at the order of Admiral Dönitz, whose appointment as Hitler’s successor in May 1945 was among the last Enigma messages successfully decoded at Bletchley Park. The machines were meant for use by Germany’s U-boats and went into operation from 1942.
U-Boats wreaked havoc on Allied Atlantic supply lines. The Allies needed to break their messaging code to win the war.
M4s used an extra coding rotor to make their messages more complex. Allied codebreakers struggled to crack them, and were unable to until the capture of the U-559 submarine in October 1942.
This Engima went into the sale with a £200,000 to £300,000 estimate. A bid of £180,000 had been lodged before live bidding began.
It sold for £305,200 including premium. That makes it a significant, but not record-breaking example.
A 1942 M4 realised $800,000 at a New York auction in 2019, the most valuable known, public sale. Good quality machines routinely make hundreds of thousands of pounds.
