Kategorie: News
Sensational discovery during the search for ghost nets
During a WWF action to recover ghost nets in the Baltic Sea, research divers from the Kiel-based company Submaris made a very special discovery. By scanning the seabed with a side-scan sonar they came across an ENIGMA cipher machine from the Second World War, which had become entangled in an abandoned fishing net.
The Enigma is a rotor key machine that was used in the Third Reich to encrypt the communications of the SS, Gestapo, Wehrmacht and other state organizations. Originally, the ENIGMA code was considered to be indecipherable; with a very high personnel effort and some good ideas of the well-known mathematician Alan Turing, the English succeeded in deciphering it during World War II, which had far-reaching consequences for warfare. Although these machines were produced in very high numbers at that time, they are very rare and historically significant today.
Ghost nets are abandoned fishing nets, which are a deadly trap for fish, marine mammals and seabirds and additionally pollute the seas as plastic waste. The WWF uses state-of-the-art technology to detect the nets in an environmentally friendly way. A side-scan sonar is used to scan the seabed for the nets and the suspected sites are then examined by divers. In the process, they repeatedly come across unusual objects. This was also the case in November in the Gelting Bay, where the ENIGMA machine was located. "The WWF has been working for many years to rid the Baltic Sea of dangerous ghost nets. We regularly find larger objects where the nets get tangled up under water. Such so-called "hook points" are often tree trunks or stones. However, ENIGMA is by far the historically most exciting find we have ever had", says Gabriele Dederer, Ghost Net Advisor at WWF Germany.
In 1945, a large-scale self-sinking operation of the German navy took place in the Gelting Bay. They sank around 50 submarines there so that they would not have to hand them over to the Allies. "We suspect that our ENIGMA went overboard in the course of this event", says Florian Huber, underwater archaeologist and diver in the Submaris team, which was commissioned by the WWF and found the cipher machine.
In cases like this, the WWF works closely with the archaeological state offices and the ammunition recovery service of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Schleswig-Holstein. "If we find historical objects, we pass on the positions directly to the offices. They then take care of further investigations," says Gabriele Dederer. The images generated with the WWF sonar are published in the WWF Ghost Diver app. The WWF hopes for a lively participation of the diving scene in order to verify suspicious positions, which could be a net. "If further archaeological finds are discovered in the process, we would like to point out the legal obligation to report them, as they may be underwater cultural heritage sites", explains Gabriele Dederer. A leaflet on how to behave correctly in the event of such a find can be found in the app.
The ENIGMA from the Gelting Bay is now being transferred to the restoration workshop of the Museum of Archaeology in Schleswig. There it will be examined in detail and conserved.
Related Link:
WWF Ghost Diver app