Bidding war boosts Enigma auction

One of the few remaining Enigma coding machines has been sold at auction for more than double its estimated price.

A Sotheby’s spokesman said a telephone bidding war between two unnamed parties had resulted in the Nazis’ cipher creator going for £149,000.

That is not, however, a record. Bonham’s sold another example of the three-rotor device for $269,000 (£172,350) in April.

The Oscar-winning film The Imitation Game probably helped inflate the sums.

The 2014 film recounted the British scientist Alan Turing’s successful effort to break the codes generated by the boxes.

The Enigma machines had 159,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible settings, leading the Nazis to believe it was uncrackable.

However, Turing was able to develop another machine – the Bombe – building on the work of Polish cryptanalysts.

This was capable of cracking 84,000 Enigma messages a month, the equivalent of two every minute.

Although it has been estimated that the Germans built about 100,000 Engimas – including five different mainstream versions – most were destroyed by the Nazis as they retreated, not knowing that their system had been compromised.

The seller of the Service Enigma Machine (Enigma I) sold at Sotheby’s was a European museum, but its identity has not been disclosed.

Both Sotheby’s and Bonham’s models featured thumbwheels made of bakelite – an early plastic – rather than metal.

The Nazis switched to bakelite towards the end of World War Two because their metal supplies had become diminished.

The fact that surviving models featuring the substance are particularly rare will have contributed to their high selling prices.