Enigma Machines Fetch High Prices at Auctions

[Fansome]

I don't know if this woman "Eve M. Kahn", is related to the "David Kahn" later mentioned in this article, but my guess is that she is.

I can say this: David Kahn's "The Codebreakers" is one of the best  books about about cryptography that you can find. The first version covers up to the late 60s or so. The second version is not that useful. as in respect to the digital revolution, but it is still worth reading if it's all you can find.

Antiques

By EVE M. KAHN
Published: May 16, 2013

“It’s got spying, it’s got mystery, it’s got great stories behind it,” Kenneth Rendell, the founder of the Museum of World War II, in Natick, Mass., said in a phone interview. He has nine Enigma machines on view. (Another is on loan at the New-York Historical Society through May 27.)

The devices and related material now routinely bring five-figure prices at auction. On March 12 a canvas sheath for an Enigma instruction book, marked with a yellowish cross, perhaps to disguise it as a first-aid guide, sold for $13,800 at James D. Julia Auctioneers in Fairfield, Me.

On April 24 an Enigma machine in a wooden box sold for $76,000 at Christie’s in London. On May 9 a rusty model missing the letters O and Z brought around $22,000 at Hermann Historica auction house in Munich. On May 25 Auction Team Breker in Cologne, Germany, will offer an Enigma that a Danish officer preserved. (The high estimate is $32,500.)

Many countries ban sales of Nazi memorabilia, but the Enigma is exempt.

“It’s so apolitical in itself,” David Hamer, an executive committee member at the National Cryptologic Museum at Fort Meade in Maryland, who helps sell Enigmas, said in a phone interview.

Oddities in the field keep turning up. At the Bloomfield Science Museum in Jerusalem, an Enigma has a keyboard converted to Hebrew. The Bletchley Park National Codes Center, at the estate near London where British forces deciphered enemy messages, is showing a ruined machine fished out of a river in Poland. (It had recently appeared on eBay.)

The code center, part of the setting for a new television series, “The Bletchley Circle,” is restoring its 1940s huts and digitizing a voluminous archive.

“We found boxes of papers we didn’t know we had,” Victoria Worpole, the center’s director of education and collections, said in a phone interview.

David Kahn, a historian in Manhattan who has written about Enigmas for decades, is donating his library to the National Cryptologic Museum.

He keeps buying more books, but resists the temptation to own an actual Enigma.

“Those things weigh a ton,” Mr. Kahn said.