![]() It is therefore a rare and significant occasion to be able to offer one at auction." Only a few hundred Enigma machines are known to have survived to this day, in private collections or public institutions. "On top of this, Churchill announced that he had ordered all Enigma machines to be destroyed at the end of the war. Rather than have the machines fall into enemy hands, commanders were ordered to destroy these secret machines upon retreat, and documents pertaining to their manufacture were burned or in many cases simply lost. "It is unknown exactly how many enigma machines were made, but we know that relatively few survived the war. The later, more advanced 'D' reflector could be inserted into an earlier Enigma model, as the case with the 1938 machine in this auction. "One of the greatest design benefits of the Enigma machine was that its mechanical components were interchangeable between models. This factor also stopped it from causing as significant a headache for Allied code break. As the UKW-D was not distributed very widely and introduced late into the war, it is very rare. "It was first observed on Januin Norwegian traffic. The rare surviving Enigma machine which almost undid the heroic efforts of the Bletchley Park code breakers It is a field re-wirable reflector introduced by the Luftwaffe as a means to improve the cipher security of the Enigma. ![]() Joseph Robson, a specialist at Bonhams, said: "The Enigma D reflector (Umkehrwalze D) in the Enigma machine is of particular importance. After the war, the model on sale continued to be used by Norwegian secret police. It is one of only 250 Enigma machines known to still exist. The 11ins by 6ins machine, originally built in 1938, comes in its original stained oak box with keys, a reversal rotor and its original instructions. One of them has emerged after 77 years and is expected to trigger a bidding war when it comes to auction at Bonhams in Knightsbridge, London. Surviving models of the updated type-1 machines with the UKW-D are exceptionally rare as relatively few were ever produced and most were destroyed to stop them falling into enemy hands. But the UKW-D was not invented until 1944, meaning it was not widely distributed before the war's end and failed to turn the tide in Germany's favour. They introduced a field rewirable reflector, called the UKW-D, to the machine, making their messages even more secure and threatening to outpace Turing's breakthrough. In response to this alarming development, the German Luftwaffe issued an 'update'. It was used by the Nazis to code and decode secret messages which were considered 'unbreakable' until British mathematicians led by Alan Turing were famously able to decipher it in 1942. The German machines had three rotors, each with 26 positions, to create 17,576 possible combinations for each letter. A rare surviving Enigma machine that almost undid the heroic efforts of the Bletchley Park codebreakers in World War Two is tipped to sell for £100,000.
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