Ive been apart of that project but it's been dead for years, seems like it's unmaintained now :(

Or it's a garbled message.

I think this is the most likely answer. Everything in Germany was collapsing at the time, so a garbled messaged being sent, or incorrectly received seems likely. Consider the circumstances:

- 6 days after US and Soviet forces linked up bisecting Germany

- 1 day after Hitler's suicide

- 5 days before the unconditional surrender of the Flensburg Government

That's a pretty good set up for some wild fiction. You could go to the fabled moon / arctic bases, time travel, aliens ... it's a nice foundation. Problem is these days people would start believing in whatever fiction you write. The internet is broken like that.

A company I used to work for was partly comprised of hackers, and one of the books they always raved about was called Cryptonomicon. I know that it involves the nazis and encoded secrets, though I never read it (still on my to-read list). I'd recommend checking it out if that kind of thing sounds interesting to you.

I read it back in the day. I can't remember much of the plot, but i do remember that it seemed about twice as long as it needed to be. Which I find ro be typical of Stephenson's fiction. Plenty of people seem to like it though.

He does like regressions into historical causes and effect chains... hell the whole system of the world trilogy is almost nothing BUT that (and contains some character/family crossovers with cryptonomicon)

Less so than his later books in my opinion. It’s a lot of great plot throughout with good explanations of the math concepts it refers to.

I may be biased, After reading wheel of time, nothing seems too long anymore!

I liked it but I thought it was overly dramatic in a "survival of the fittest" way and indeed way too long. But I'm not a fan of the guy anyway.

It is a decent book to read once though.

Cryptonomicon is almost exactly this premise :) It’s an amazing book, one that any aspiring hacker should read!

Not just the internet.

Animal Planet made a fake documentary about Mermaids (a somewhat hokey one at that), with a disclaimer that it was a work of fiction.

Despite that, it's convinced a generation of fools that mermaids are real.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mermaids-the-body-found/

But back to the internet. Plenty of youtube clips from this program where commenters are insistent that it's evidence that Mermaids are real. And comments linking to the footage of the disclaimer, and resulting dumb arguments. Still! In 2023!

It is only somewhat hokey.

I love a bad/earnest low-budget movie. I think they are often much more revealing about the nature of culture, cinema and art than -- to pick a single counterpoint -- really anything in the MCU except Age of Ultron [0].

There were plenty of things in that to like. I watched it only recently, I'm glad they made it, and I hope the people who make it continue to reject the big bucks.

[0] This is a hill I will die on. Almost everything in the MCU is pointless dross except James Spader as Ultron.

This is basically the setting of Gravity’s Rainbow.

Low-key, you could claim that about nearly anything and nobody would/could really challenge you for Gravity's Rainbow

See also, Finnegan's Wake. For instance, here's a nonsense claim that sounds plausible: Finnegan's Wake is the best book about the Irish Civil War. You feel the frenzy and delirium of the lucid somnambulism that comes with insomnia on the battlefield. As foggy and vivid as war, the words carefully balance the interregnum between the forbidden, forgotten and forsaken laid bare as poetry. The deconstruction of the language is married with the deconstruction of life as belligerents kill over conflicting dreams.

The middle third or so of GR describes a fairly lucid plot in which the characters are traversing Germany during its final disintegration at the end of WW2 and the beginning of the Allied occupation.

As does Finnegan's Wake.

Th are even great historical starting points for such fiction, like the bunch of German U-Boats spread across the world (mostly the Atlantic), including one (U-234) en route to Japan with special cargo including uranium oxide, high-ranking Germans and Japanese and an Me-262.

Better starting hook that the Last Resort series (US nuclear submarine with intercontinental ballistic missiles refuses weird orders, is fired upon by the US Navy, and decides to occupy a fictitious island).

Maybe solving this would be determining a set of likely encrypted messages.

They could be scored by decrypted content matching structure of priors and context. Along with char difference from the encrypted message on record.

I can picture it: a German soldier feeling defeated just set the keys to something random and typed his message, sending a message without expecting anyone to hear...

"In the old days, if someone had a secret they didn’t want to share, they went up a mountain, found a tree, carved a hole in it, and whispered the secret into the hole. Then they covered it with mud and leave the secret there forever." - Wong Kar Wai/In The Mood for Love

Or a message from an allied conscript who was just doodling after he found this weird typewriter

Amusing image though this is, Enigma machines were, in case you weren’t aware, not actually radio transmitter/receivers.

An enigma message would be typed in to the machine and the output characters written down on a piece of paper, then the message would be transmitted over Morse by hand, transcribed to paper at the other end, then typed through the correspondingly configured Enigma machine to obtain plaintext.

I have enough trouble typing things I mean to say without trying to transcribe line noise. That sounds like a terrible job.

In absolute terms, pre-digital cryptographic equipment operator isn't the worst wartime job I can think of. However, on a U-boat, all of the jobs were equally worse (due to life expectancy).

Actually makes me wonder - given the way encrypted messages were transmitted in the era, wasn’t it possible for an adversary to flood the channel with bogus messages? Transmit messages with valid addressing and header data but fake content, forcing radio operators to transcribe and attempt to decrypt garbage?

Also, what if the machine was broken? Or if there was an error in transcription? There are so many possible reasons why this message may never be decrypted.

Surely this would be tantamount to announcing to the enemy that you have broken their encryption scheme?

Yes. As such it would be a last resort and even then likely done very carefully (perhaps even to the point of burning a high level human intelligence source or sources as a plausible explanation for it). We're talking "no alternative" levels of desperation.

Why? You don’t need to be able to understand a cipher to produce plausible cipher text. You can take headers and footers from real messages and just drop in nonsense between. Or retransmit messages you recorded a few days earlier, or random mixtures of bits of real messages. The enemy still has to transcribe them, sort them out, reject the noise.

From what I recall of how Enigma worked, headers (and footers, if the concept applied) were also encrypted.

IIRC a transmission started with the rotor settings for the rest of the message encrypted using the daily setting and sent twice. Even sending this much, such that both copies communicated the same setting, would reveal that Enigma was compromised, I think.

You don't want to DoS the communication, you want for them to keep using it so you can intercept valuable information.

The coded messages were usually sent over the radio via straight key Morse code.

Once you have a few months experience in Morse code you are able recognize who is "talking" by the way they operate the key. The radiomen would know pretty quick if some new guy came started sending them bogus messages.

Probably done to intentionally troll amateur cryptographers in the future and waste CPU. These guys really were Nazis.

Impossible to say. The German commo who was tasked with decrypting this message couldn't/didn't decrypt it, and he had the keys.

For all we know, some bored German submariner sent garbage over the radio as protest; this message was sent two days after Hitler committed suicide, 7 days before VE day. (8 days if you're of the Soviet persuasion) Morale and discipline has a tendency to break down under those circumstances.

Or it could be a transcription error. Modern cryptanalysis tends to be more resilient to transcription errors; one character wrong is gonna be ok, one character inserted/deleted will tend to produce two messages, one with garbage after the insertion/deletion and another with garbage before it. But Enigma messages were...terse, so a half-successful decrypt that gets half garbage and half plaintext might still be recognized by the cryptanalysis algorithm as the wrong key. I expect there would have to be at least two transcription errors to cause both the original German commo to be unable to decrypt it and modern attempts to fail.

Garbled message, or garbled key? I wonder how often mis-keyed messages were sent out. Not typos in the message, but setting the initial state to the wrong value. Transposition, for instance.

Garbled message. If it were a garbled key, that would explain why the original commo couldn't/didn't decrypt it, but if it were just a garbled key, modern cryptanalysis would have decrypted it already.