[Nick Beale]

Originally Posted by lpunktlpunkt

Thank you Nick!
That helps a lot. I will have to look at the HW5 files instead.
If I understand correctly, they are not yet digitized.

Correct, they are not digitised.

Do you by any chance already have scans of some files that you would be willing to share?

I have photos of about 18,000 HW5 pages, mostly from 1944–45. I have collected these over the last nine years and they were taken either because they related to something I was already working on or just because I thought they looked interesting. There was no system beyond that, which is probably why I now spend time at Kew revisiting files to get things I missed or didn't realise I would need. I do not have any index of the messages' individual numbers or content (and it's too late to start now), I just keep a folder on my computer for each HW5 file I've looked at; each folder contains photos I took of pages from that file.

So the only time that I can share something is when someone gives me the serial number of the message they want (assuming it's one I have). Anything else would just take too much time away from my own research. Realistically, I could not read through 18,000 pages in search of the words "Knight's Cross" (for example) and even if you knew there was an announcement on a specific date, it would still mean searching a few hundred pages to be certain, because not everything was deciphered right away.

ULTRA is a fantastic source but it needs enormous time and effort to get anything from it. For example I have recently read online through about 14,000 frames of naval messages and found just a dozen relevant to my Kommando Rastedter project.

Bletchley Park did keep an elaborate index of names, places, aircraft, topics etc. As far as I know, that is not held by the National Archives and may not have survived the war. However, the BP Museum has a long-term project to digitise about 3 million pages of archive material they hold, so maybe the index is part of that. I first heard about this project in 2011 but nothing has emerged so far that I know of.

I also saw that it is possible to request scanned copies from the National Archive. Do you have any experience with this process?

No, I don't. Sorry.

I am also unsure how many pages we are speaking about. You mentioned that it goes in the tens of thousands in total. So it is a few hundred pages per file?

If we are talking about the entire war, then the series runs from file HW5/1 (6 Feb–16 July 1940) to HW5/703 (7–23 May 1945). That's just the Army/Luftwaffe material and does not include the Naval, Police, Abwehr, Diplomatic and other decrypts. I never counted but I guess that each file would average about 300–400 pages.