Divers searching the Baltic Sea for abandoned fishing nets have found a rare Nazi coding machine from World War II.
German divers, working on behalf of the World Wildlife Federation (WWF), stumbled across one of the famous Enigma machines in waters about 150km north of Hamburg.
They had started last month's expedition searching for discarded fishing nets before they unexpectedly found the device, used by Nazis to encrypt messages.
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"What a find," wrote Florian Huber, an archaeologist and research diver, on his Facebook page.
"I will not forget this day. Once in a lifetime."
Initially the divers believed they had found an old typewriter but on closer inspection it turned out to be a historic relic.
Vitally important to Nazi war efforts, the Enigma machine was used by the German military in World War II to encrypt messages into a form they believed was unbreakable.
But the code was cracked by cryptologists at the top secret Bletchley Park base in southern England - a breakthrough widely credited with having shortened the war by at least two years.
The episode was dramatised in the 2014 film The Imitation Game.
Naval historians believe the Enigma machine discovered last month was discarded by retreating German forces at the close of World War II.
Jann Witt, from the German Naval Association, told DPA that it was likely tossed overboard from a Nazi warship in 1945 before the end of the conflict.
Last week, the divers handed the device to a German museum for restoration.
Today only about 50 of the thousands of Enigma machines produced during World War II remain.
In 2015, one sold at auction for a record US$365,000 (A$492,000).
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