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WW2 American Intercepts by Germany Still Classified?



This message appeared this week on H-WAR, a public email listserv for
military history.  The message was posted in the context of a discussion
about which World War II era documents are still classified.  The answer is
"quite a few", as I have learned during the past few years.  If this is
true, perhaps someone is interested in obtaining, say, the transcripts of
telephone conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt, which would be of
some small historical interest.

Michael Ravnitzky
mikerav@ix.netcom.com

From: Tobias Jersak <tj204@cus.cam.ac.uk>
Author's Subject: REPLY: Classified WW2 Documents in NARA
Date Posted: Mon, 17 Jul 2000

Whereas the Allies - slowly - started releasing those documents that
contain previously encrypted GERMAN or JAPANESE messages (decrypted by such
institutions as Bletchley), they have not yet released any of THEIR OWN
documents that were decrypted by the GERMANS and captured in Germany after
the war. We know, for example, for sure that the Germans managed to hack
into the scrambled phone line between Churchill and Roosevelt and listened
to every conversation between the two leaders. We have the report of the
responsible Nazi Minister to Hitler of March 1942 (that's when they
achieved the breakthrough) - but we have so far not seen a single page of
the transcripts of these conversations. I can understand why America and
Britain would still not release them. But they might contain a lot, to say
the least. Our only source so far, after having established that they
actually did listen to the conversations and transcribe them, is Goebbels's
diary. He was sent a copy of those transcripts and reports extensively in
his diary  about what the two Western leaders were up to. His reports,
however, sound sometimes quite fantastic. A study in this field is still to
be awaited.

Incidentally, the Germans were able to decipher several Russian codes, and
the raw material of these decrypts has been made (mostly?) available
recently (1996) in the National Archives. Yet, since it is almost
completely in Russian, I don't know whether any scholar has looked into
them since.

Tobias Jersak
Cambridge
<tj204@cus.cam.ac.uk>

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