Seeing as the 75th Anniversary of the start of WWII in Europe the ist of September and the Official Secrets Act covering official WWII material is for 75 years…when can we start to see mass releases of files? Especially FO files dealing with Poland?
Protection under the Official Secrets Act lasts indefinitely - as in, there is no fixed term - but it only applies if disclosure would be “damaging”.
Note that the Official Secrets Act creates the offence, for a public servant, of disclosing secret information which he acquires in his official capacity, but it doesn’t provide a comprehensive code dealing with the disclosure of official information. That is more the provide of the Freedom of Information Act.
There is a convention that Cabinet papers are kept confidential for a period of 30 years, and then released on New Year’s Day of the thirtieth year, but individual papers may be kept back. There is no statutory basis for the thirty-year rule, so far as I know.
I don’t know if there is a 75-year rule applying to official information from the war and, if there is, whether it only applied to cabinet papers (i.e. it substitutes for the 30-year rule) or more widely. If there is a 75-year rule applying to wartime cabinet papers, then the papers up to 31 December 1939 would have been released on 1 January last.
To illustrate UDS’ point, here’s an article from 2 January 1970when the 1939 Cabinet papers were released.
The thirty-year rule did have a statutory basis. It was created by the 1967 Public Records Act, which amended the fifty-year rule created by the 1958 Public Records Act.
But it’s no longer a thirty-year rule, as the transition has already begun to a twenty-year rule.
So from that we assume that all of the documents about WW2 that are ever going to be released, already have been.
I suspect the 50 year rule may still apply to documents classified prior to the 1967 act. But that’s a guess.
No, it was retrospective. But it was only ever a minimum period and there was always plenty of scope to keep back certain categories of documents for longer periods.
No. And it’s not even the top-secret stuff that hasn’t yet been released. Documents with personal details about private individuals usually remain classified for up to 100 years. So military service records for the Second World War are currently accessible only to family members.
It appears that sometimes material gets declassified but only becomes public when someone decides to write about it. This appeared to be the case with the first book about “Ultra”, the top-secret signals intelligence work at Bletchley Park that successfully cracked the German Enigma codes. It was published in 1974 by a former RAF officer, and was followed by others. It’s unclear (to me) how and when it was declassified, but for a long time after the war it continued to be such a closely guarded secret that many of the former workers there went to their graves without even their wives or children knowing what they had worked on during the war.
Or at least look at it. A huge amount of material is transferred to public archives every year. Historians and researchers are queueing up to look at the obviously important stuff, like cabinet papers, but most of it is not looked at, much less written about, until someone with a particular reason to look at low-level stuff digs it up in pursuance of some project or other.
Yeah, the definitive series about WWII, the British made The World at War makes no mention of Ultra or Bletchley or Colossus because the series wrapped just before the info was released.
Group Captain Witterbottom, who was not a codebreaker but was involved in the distribution of ULTRA, had wanted to publish a book on it for several years before he was granted permission in 1974 (apparently he need the money!). The trigger for the change of heart was a number of foreign books that had let out parts of the secret, particularly Gustave Bertrand’s Enigma: ou la Plus Grande Énigme de la Guerre 1939—1945 published in 1973. According to David Kahn the historian of cryptography part of the reason was also that most of the Enigma machines Britain had kindly supplied to its former colonies (“Totally secure, old chap”) had by then been replaced with electronic systems.
Winterbottom was not allowed access to any of the original papers so in places he was inaccurate or plain wrong. Once the basic secret was out it obviously did not make much sense to go on withholding the files from the serious researchers so material was released to the UK National Archive. It was not all released, material came out in dribs and drabs over several years and I’m not even sure it is all out now.
On the wider question, along with personal details of potentially living people, national security has always been a possible reason for departments retaining records and not transferring them to The National Archive under the 30 (now 20) year rule. What happens is that as records come up to 30 years old they are reviewed to see if they should be preserved (an awful lot of dross gets ditched as of no value) and if there is any reason they shouldn’t be made public. If the department does not want to release them it has to apply for a “Lord Chancellor’s Instrument” (I know! Quaint isn’t it!) from the TNA that allows them to retain them but will have a time limit after which they have to be reviewed again and either granted a new LCI or transferred to TNA.
On the OP - I don’t think there are many Foreign Office files from WWII still retained. A whole lot are in TNA - see their catalogue here . There are some recorded as closed but most of them seem to date from the late 40’s not 39-45.