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WW2 Russan Intercepts by Germany--still unconsulted?



Tobias Jersak <tj204@cus.cam.ac.uk> wrote (on the H-WAR list, message
forwarded):
Author's Subject: REPLY: Classified WW2 Documents in NARA
Date Posted: Mon, 17 Jul 2000

>.... 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.

This brings up what is sometimes a sore point:  I hope relatively few
archivists are shying away from (or worse, disdainful of) materials in the,
shall we say, less popular languages.  In the public library where I work,
there is a real demand for Armenian and Russian books, but nobody wants to
deal with it, simply because it's hard to fit into the online catalog.  It's
fine to have German, French and Italian on the shelf (that nobody actually
ever uses), but as for that funny-looking Armenian stuff, they couldn't be
bothered (until the library director who had been here for decades was
forced into retirement and an Armenian librarian came along --coincidence?
you decide).

Now we see a historian of World War II expressing the opinion (valid or not)
that nobody uses Russian materials in the National Archives.  The history of
WW2 can, then, be complete while ignoring the largest participant?  I
suspect NARA has enough readers of Russian to be able to handle such things
when they come through--I sure hope they aren't mouldering in storage.  The
year I entered college (1968), the number of incoming Russian majors went
from 10 to 50, and I suspect we weren't alone.  I suspect that the current
generation of font systems is making it easier for databases to handle
non-Roman materials, but wonder if the knee-jerk reaction isn't still to
ignore them?

Misha Schutt
Warner Research Collection
Burbank (Calif.) Public Library

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