I have before me now a 30-year old newspaper article about a man who collected (and used) spy radios, which ends with: He didn’t buy it, of course, but when he belatedly discovered what it actually was, he rushed back – to find it had gone. This particular myth told of a man who had seen in a market somewhere a ‘funny sort of typewriter’ for sale for a few pounds. Thirty years ago, when I first became interested in Enigma machines, and they began to appear in auctions for a few thousand pounds, I encountered an urban myth – one of those things that happen to ‘a friend of a friend’. The result is that no-one knows where the next Enigma machine may be found.
They were abandoned, stolen or lost in a hundred and one places scattered over a hundred thousand and one square miles. However, the wartime distribution of Enigma machines was virtually world-wide, and the final stages of the war so disorderly, that there could be no systematic gathering in of all the machines at that point.
A mere one machine in a hundred has survived, and a good proportion of these are safely held in museums all over the world. The number of known survivors increases, and will doubtless continue to increase, but one fact stands unchanged: the vast majority of all Enigma machines made (perhaps 45,000) have perished – destroyed in battle, sunk at sea, or deliberately smashed beyond repair to keep their secrets from the enemy. Because, occasionally, previously unknown Enigma machines come to light (especially in Eastern Europe) our knowledge about how many Enigma machines survive, and how many were made, improves with time.