 |
| The Enigma machines were
similar in appearance to large
typewriters |
| 2000: Wartime coding machine
stolen |
England have
A coding machine used by the Germans to encode messages during World
War II has been stolen from the Bletchley Park Museum in Buckinghamshire,
south-east England.
Police said the thief is thought to have carried the cipher machine , which looks like a large
typewriter, out of the museum in broad daylight, on a day when the
building was open to the public.
It is one of only three such machines in the world, and its value is
estimated at more than ?00,000.
Christine Large, the director of the Bletchley Park Trust, said, "This
particular one was extra special because it was used by the German SS and
was made to a higher standard than the ones which were used in the field.
We can only hope we get it back."
Stolen to order
It's thought the machine may have been stolen to order. It is thought
more than one person may have been involved in a carefully-planned
operation.
The machine was secured in a glass cabinet which had not been broken.
There was an alarm system in operation as well as volunteers watching over
the collections.
The theft comes just a week before a new security system was to be
installed.
'Unbreakable' code
Bletchley Park, a stately home in 50 acres of grounds, was known as
Station X during the war. There, British agents succeeded in cracking the
Enigma code - a cipher with 150 million million million possible
combinations which the Germans thought was unbreakable.
By 1945 there were 10,000 mathematicians, linguists and chess champions
working there, decoding up to 18,000 messages a day.
The methods they used - inventing machines which ran through large
numbers of possible positions in a short period of time - meant the work
at Bletchley Park paved the way for the invention of the modern computer.
Their work is said to have shortened the war by several years. Winston
Churchill referred to the staff as "the geese that laid the golden eggs,
and never cackled".
Station X was a secret until 1967, but is now a popular tourist
attraction.
