Bletchley Park WWII archive to go online

Kudos to HP and Simon Greenish for organising this:


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/10239623.stm


Regards

Graham Ellsbury


----------------------------------------------------------------


Millions of documents stored at the World War II code-breaking centre,
Bletchley Park, are set to be digitised and made available online.

Electronics company Hewlett-Packard has donated a number of scanners to the
centre in Milton Keynes so volunteers can begin the ground-breaking task.

Many of the records at the once-secret centre have not been touched for
years.

During the war, it was home to more than 10,000 men and women who decoded
encrypted German messages.

The centre hopes that once the work starts, previously untold stories about
the role Bletchley Park played in the war, will be revealed.

'Trail'

The first phase of the project is expected to take at least three years.

Simon Greenish, chief executive officer of the Bletchley Park Trust, said
the plan was for the centre's entire archive to be digitised.

He said: "We've been wanting to do this for a while. It was first discussed
five years ago, but we have just never had the funds.

"If I ever manage to secure £10,000 then that goes towards buying a new roof
as this project just has not had the attention it deserves.

"But for the first time we hope we will be able to put everything into the
public domain."

He said since the archive is so big nobody knows exactly what each
individual document stored there contains.

However, the information they expect to dig out will definitely include
communication transcripts, communiques, memoranda, photographs, maps and
other material relating to key events that took place during the war.

He said: "We have many boxes full of index cards, which have lots of
different messages on them. But this will be our chance to follow a trail
and put the messages together so we can find out what they really mean.

"We found a card talking about 4,400 tonnes of mercury being transferred
from Spain - we will be searching for further messages explaining what
happened and why this was done."

He said the archive had tremendous potential and once it was online, people
would find it easier to trace documents related to certain subjects within
minutes - something that takes days to do now.

Pictures set to go online in the archive include ones of Adolf Hitler
shortly after surviving an attempt to assassinate him. They had been taken
by his official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann.

"I'm looking toward to finding the cards relating to rubber and ball
bearings and how the Germans gathered these materials.

"The Germans developed synthetic rubber as they found it hard to get natural
rubber. They also needed lots of ball bearings for the war effort, which is
why the allied forces attacked a lot of ball bearing factories."

He said there were records in the archive which showed countries such as
Spain, Switzerland and Sweden were perhaps not as neutral as they were
portrayed.

"It is quite clear there was a lot of correspondence going on between these
countries," he said.

He said the volunteers had already unearthed records showing countries
including Spain dealing in diamonds with the Japanese and other German
allies.

He said more information about the double agent Garbo - a Spaniard whose
real name was Juan Pujol Garcia - was likely to come out once the work on
the archive began.

Garbo, who has been described as World War II's "greatest double agent",
persuaded the Nazis that the allied forces were planning their D-Day
operation in Calais rather than Normandy.

He said he was also expecting more information about the fuel the Germans
were discovered to be sending to Pennemuende, a small village close to the
Baltic Sea.

The hard copies of the documents are stored in a massive room
He said: "We didn't know anything about it initially, but then because of
the message that Bletchley Park decoded, the allies sent a reconnaissance
aircraft and they found out that rockets - weapons of terror - were being
developed there. The RAF then attacked the site."

He said the documents were all important as just one obscure message could
have led to thousands of lives being saved.

Laura Seymour, from Hewlett-Packard, said her company contacted Bletchley
Park in September 2009 after learning of its plight.

The company donated a number of scanners and people to provide technical
expertise to the charity.

Ms Seymour estimated the cost to HP was in the tens of thousands but said it
was a project that was worth being involved in.

Mr Greenish believed the archive would be an important research tool and
could even attract more people to the site. It would also ensure the
preservation of the fragile hard copies.

Currently most of the documents are too difficult to view or handle and few
have access to them. But Bletchley Park hopes that its new archive will one
day be a different type of gateway to the past.