Free A World at Arms by Gerhard L. Weinberg Page B

various categories of captured records, a fine place to start is Robert Wolfe (ed.), Captured German and Related Records (Athens, Ohio: Ohio Univ. Press, 1974).For the main depository of British records, see The Second World War: A Guide to Documents in the Public Record Office (London: HMSO, 1972 ).
    On German records still in the United States, see Gerhard L. Weinberg, Guide to Captured German Documents (Montgomery, Ala.: 1952), and “Supplement to the Guide to Captured German Documents” (Washington: National Archives, 1959); those returned to Germany are covered by the inventories ( Findbücher ) of the German Federal Archives in Koblenz. The microfilms made before their return are described in Howard M. Ehrmann, A Catalogue of the Files and Microfilms of the German Foreign Ministry Archives 1867–1920 (Washington: American Historical Association, 1959); George O. Kent, A Catalog of the Files and Microfilms of the German Foreign Ministry 1920–1945, 4 vols. (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1962–72); and the series “Guides to German Records Microfilmed at Alexandria, Va.” issued by the U.S. National Archives since 1958. For a helpful introduction to the fate of Italian archives in the war, see Howard M. Smyth, Secrets of the Fascist Era (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1975); there is also a 3-volume series of “Guides” to captured Italian records microfilmed in the United States which has been issued by the National Archives.
    The major collection of Japanese World War II records accessible to those who do not read Japanese is in the National Archives in Washington. There are several series of intercepted Japanese diplomatic, military attaché, naval attaché, army and navy, as well as related German messages–with some of them running to tens and even hundreds of thousands, which are included in the Record Group 457 of the National Security Agency, the inheritor of the American wartime decoding records. These materials are of immense importance because they reflect not only affairs internal to the Japanese diplomatic and military services but because they report on the countries where Japanese diplomats were stationed. Furthermore, for the Japanese as for the Gernlan records, the destruction of war has in many cases left the translated intercepts the only surviving copies of documents of which no German or Japanese originals exist.
    Other major collections in the U.S. National Archives which have been canvassed for this book are the records of the War Department’s G-2 (Intelligence) Section and the vast assemblage of materials gathered for the post-war trials of war criminals. In the difficult choice of which of the many huge archival collections to work through personally, I decided to emphasize the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library at Hyde Park. There is a vast amount of material on all aspects of the war which, if studied patiently, reveals a good deal about the way in which the President ran the American war effort. There are good finding aids at the library which also contains the papers of Henry Morgenthau and numerous other high officials of the Roosevelt administration. Items from Hyde Park are cited as from the Roosevelt files unless otherwise noted, and they are referred to by the filing system in use at the library.
    The major depository in England is the Public Record Office (PRO) at Kew. There the prospective reader will find the major collections of the papers of the Cabinet, Prime Minister, Foreign Office, the three service departments, some important personal papers, and a great deal more, all covered by “class lists” from which one selects the files needed and then calls them up via an unusually polite computer. The bulk of British wartime records has been opened, but there areannoying exceptions, a subject commented on at the end of this essay. Those documents cited in this book are referred to by the designation used at the PRO, including the