Lost German Enigma Machine Codes Uncovered! | Expedition Unknown

we walk and walk and soon i realize we’re passing through a grid of empty streets yadak i don’t see a city everything is gone everything all of it did the soviets flatten it yes soviets destroyed the whole city here literally destroyed everything i’ve never seen this before the place is completely flat [Music] this was once a thriving city today its only residents are empty avenues basements without houses even a church without walls there was once a soaring castle here today it is simply a set of stairs the town has been called the polish pompeii because preserved in its ashes is a potential bonanza of artifacts from the very final days of the war [Music] every home shop and office here was repurposed by the nazis for the defense of berlin and now jerich has gotten exclusive access to excavate in the ruins this is the first time anyone has

excavated this part of the town and we you and i are here to see it also on site is pavel piatkovic fresh from working on the mru tunnels nearby he’s here to support his friend jarek in his own excavations good to see you again yeah how are you the objection good okay so what are we working on here there was once a building here but this was the cellar entrance where’s the entrance what do you have so what’s down here we found a few interesting things interesting how items that seemed military issued this was a command area we think it was a place for high command officers can i can i see the things that you found oh they’re still inside yes oh they just me me first yes oh boy let’s go come on let’s do it [Music] oh boy oh there’s a lot of a lot of spider webs

which is good yes feet first very good okay i’m in where does this go no spiders it’s a big spider right there holy there’s a whole chamber down here whoa look at this place ah hi josh hi so it’s huge how old are these chambers just like this is very old this is a medieval seller it would have been used to store food but when we opened it up there were items to suggest the military was using it and there’s one more thing in here i really want to show you yeah what’s here [Music] is this electrical there was no power in costume so the germans would connect their important buildings to generators we also found things like this with batteries [Music] we see volts here and a warning not to throw it and to keep it away from from water and these are the battery cells here wow

would this have powered lights or is this like an emergency backup you think we think it powered our radio are there more rooms like this that were used by the nazis there are many but they’ve been buried as well we need to access them from back outside this is not the same chamber this is another chamber this is near the chamber we were in but we haven’t been able to open it yet everything is collapsed it has been collapsed since 1945. this looks blocked though so how how do we get in here you’re going to have to dig dig with one coparca what’s a koparka this is a kaparka since the soviets burned this entire town down to rubble shovels aren’t going to cut it this excavator should be our ticket into the new chamber kaparka and it doesn’t take long to open a door

into the past look at that that’s a chamber this excavator is pulling up dirt that’s filled this cellar for decades and that dirt may be as valuable as anything inside i break out a metal detector to see what it can see [Music] nail oh hey hey come here come here look at this come here come here bobble look look look oh josh a container yeah oh oh german helmet yeah that’s a helmet how absolutely chilling is that german helmet yeah in a destroyed fortress in poland i’ve just found a relic of the nazi occupation here that was abandoned in the final days of world war ii this just connects you to this place in such a primal way you know it’s like a person wore this a nazi soldier wore this helmet it’s kind of haunting with the red army coming through here i can’t imagine many germans survived this

place you’re holding history in your hands [Music] holy hell look at this this goes way back home okay so obviously this roof is uh no guarantees here guys so be really really cautious we’ve got an alcove here on the left oh my god we got more chambers down here look at this oh my god we’ve got bottles coffee cups lamps cooking pots you could just imagine a soldier right here uh uh-huh oh wow yes yes what would run off of this high voltage we can’t know for sure but this would have produced a lot of not all energy had power supplies so this room must have been very important but wait there’s more well look gas mask oh my god we’ve got a gas mask here and here’s the face piece right here this is a blue gas mask it indicates a non-magnetic mask these were

issued to people near radio frequencies as to not interfere ah for radio yeah so we’ve got high voltage we’ve got this maybe radio station yes it looks like this is the fortress’s radio room this would have been one of the most crucial places in the whole city to the nazis and it isn’t until we explore the back of the chamber that we learn exactly how crucial wow look over here josh oh this is a paper all of this is burned look at this so we’ve got writing along the top here different columns and rows that are labeled what what is this exactly these look like they’ve been through decryption i’m not 100 sure but i think these are from an enigma [Music] enigma yeah these were used with enigma machines they look to me like they are okay wow these papers many now burned in black

appear to be products of enigma a complex encryption device used by all branches of the german military to send top secret communications from the outside it resembled a humble typewriter but looks are deceiving enigma could scramble a message into hundreds of millions of possible permutations the consequences were catastrophic allowing german forces across land sea and air to communicate their movements without fear of compromise it was only when british mathematician alan turing and the team at bletchley park england cracked the enigma code that the tide of the war turned to the side of the allies to find out what these communiques were telling the nazis i rushed back to the surface to find our translator oliver what does it say oliver okay this is writing on this what does it say uh receiving some devices at this at a location so they’re receiving some sort of

devices they should receive some sort of device there’s definitely something here but it’s difficult to make out listen then correspondence about prisoners that have been kept here you know i’m reading this on the fly but um it’s it refers to the krisger fungal lager stalag [Music] so something to do with the high ranking commander and this field post which involves a prison camp near here yes well we’ll photograph all the pages we can see and i think we leave the rest aside somebody may be able to carefully separate the pages later i don’t want to mess them up the paperwork likely a transfer order for prisoners would have been encrypted which means enigma was nearby you