Hi, my name is Stephen Bond.
Over the last few years I have become interested in wartime German enigma coding machines.
To put this into a more personal context my dad was involved in the removal of two m4’s from the U81 at Pula. This story wasn’t related until my family watched a BBC documentary series called "The secret war", in 1977. Part 6 covered Enigma and I believe Lorenz, though a great deal of information was still described as secret. As part of the programme an enigma machine was shown (and demonstrated) on camera for the first time on British television.
The night we watched the programme, my father stated that he had been involved in a visit to U81 "at the end of the war", however in 2012 I finally found out that this visit had actually taken place in November 1944 when the place was still crawling with Germans.
Unlike the machine shown, neither of the ones he had seen, had either the metal plate on the inside of the lid or the Enigma ink stamps on the inside of the wooden cases. It is therefore likely that as neither machine bore the H & R Enigma brand that they were produced by Olympia in Erfurt.
I have a number of surviving souvenirs’ from this escapade and am now working on the long term assembly of a composite m4 to include these parts.
…and I thought tracking down engineering drawings to support the restoration of spitfires was bad enough. That’s part of another hobby.
All the best
Steve B
