Nazi coding machine found for sale on eBay

For codebreakers with the allied forces, it was a more important a discovery than the Enigma machine, offering encryption for the Nazi command that, when cracked, would hasten the end of the second world war and lead to huge breakthroughs in modern computing. Less than 80 years later, for a thrifty saleswoman in Essex, the "telegram machine" was little more than a dusty antique languishing in the garden shed that could fetch just 9.50 on eBay. But after an eagle-eyed volunteer with the National Museum of Computing (NMC) spotted the online ad this week, the extremely rare, military-issue Lorenz teleprinter has been saved and forms the latest piece in international efforts to rebuild Hitler's complete encoding device. After finding the component on the online auction site, and receiving a long-term loan of the Lorenz SZ42 cipher machine from the Norwegian Armed Forces Museum in Oslo, the museum is now looking for the final parts to restore the encoder back to working order. "To do that we have to replace some missing components, in particular the drive motor – and it's the drive motor that's our next quest," said Whetter, a volunteer engineer with the NMC.