STORY: In 2017, hobby treasure hunters found what they first thought was a banal typewriter in a forest near Aying, in the south of Munich. However, the machine turned out to be a Nazi cipher machine. It was the successor to the well-known Enigma. The sober name is: “Key Device 41”. Inventor was Fritz Menzer. Carola Dahlke, cryptology curator at the Deutsches Museum in Munich: “What we find so exciting is that there were inventions at the same time. Fritz Menzer not only invented this device. He invented other machines. He also has crypto analysis – Invented devices to break the codes of other countries. It hasn’t been described anywhere at all.” There is a film project and app for this encryption device, and all of this was presented in Munich. One of the exciting things about the story is that after the war, Menzer led a secret life as a double agent that his family didn’t know about. Menzer’s daughter Gudrun Jackson and his grandson Andreas Langer attended the presentation of the research results. “I’m blown away! I just can’t believe it, especially after losing him 17 years ago and he never talked about it, really never. It’s very hard to describe.” Nor does she have to. Because this chapter of German history is described by the scientists of the Deutsches Museum. Research into the encryption device and its inventor took more than four years. And the result of this intensive work by cryptology expert Carola Dahlke can now be admired in Munich.