Man held over stolen Enigma machine November 18, 2000 LONDON, England -- A man has been arrested in connection with the theft of an "Enigma" encoding machine used by the Nazis during World War II. UK Crime Squad officers made the arrest one month after the machine was sent to British journalist Jeremy Paxman.   The encoding machine was stolen from a museum in April The machine, one of just three surviving devices of its kind, was stolen from a display cabinet at Bletchley Park museum during an open day in April. "A 57-year-old man has been arrested in connection with the theft of the Enigma machine from Bletchley Park," a spokesman for Thames Valley Police in southern England said, adding the man had been arrested on Friday. Bletchley, an estate near London code-named "Station X" during the World War II, was the nerve centre of British decoding efforts and considered so secret that its existence was not revealed until the late 1960s. In October a ransom note for £25,000 ($35,600) from someone claiming to be writing on behalf of "The Master" was sent to Bletchley Park along with a threat that the machine would be destroyed if the money was not paid before a deadline. The existence of Bletchley Park was kept secret until the 1960s   The estate said it had agreed to pay the ransom but the money was never handed over and the mystery deepened when the machine was sent to Paxman at the British Broadcasting Corporation. While the stolen machine was worth about £100,000 ($142,400), its historical value is impossible to estimate. Enigma was the name given to the German military coding system used to direct ships, submarines and armies on all fronts of the Third Reich's battle to dominate Europe. It relied on typewriter-like machines at both ends to decode messages. Two such devices were handed to British intelligence agents in 1939 by the Polish, helping the Allies decipher secret messages at Bletchley Park and, in the words of then-UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill, shorten the war by two years   Last Updated November 18 -  visitors since the start of time