Codebreaking

Device used in Nazi coding machine found for sale on eBay

For codebreakers with the allied forces, it was more important a discovery than the Enigma machine, offering encryption for the Nazi command that, when cracked, would hasten the end of the second world war and lead to huge breakthroughs in modern computing.

Less than 80 years later, for a thrifty woman in Essex, the “telegram machine” was little more than a dusty old gadget languishing in the garden shed.

But after an eagle-eyed volunteer with the National Museum of Computing (NMC) spotted an ad on eBay this week, the extremely rare, military-issue Lorenz teleprinter has been saved and provides the latest piece in international efforts to rebuild Hitler’s complete encoding device.