ENIGMA Machines

[Mike Cecil]

Gents,

A little known fact: at war's end, many captured/'forfeited' Enigma machines (3 rotor) were distributed by the Brits to countries like Australia for signals encoding-decoding in the years just post-war. Australia's intelligence community (the pre-decessors of DSD: Defence Signals Directorate) received several (numbers are fuzzy) and used them for several years, mostly for diplomatic signals traffic (since only the 'good guys' had the means to break the code).

When the organisation moved to Canberra from Melbourne many years ago, the bulk of them were broken up and destroyed. Two survived - they were incomplete/broken and in the back of a storage cupboard, and escaped the breakers hammers. They are still owned by DSD. One is on display in their foyer (secure area: no public access) and the other is on long-term loan to the AWM, and on display in the WW2 gallery.

There is also an Enigma machine at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, but I don't know its source: it was not acquired from DSD.

Mike C