NSA releases thousands of WWII-era documents to National Archives

More than 29,000 pages of declassified material related to the World War II-era Target Intelligence Committee (TICOM) are now publicly available following a recent transfer from the National Security Agency to the National Archives and Records Administration, NSA announced May 23.

It was NSA’s final transfer of its material related to TICOM, a joint project that began in 1944 between the United States and the United Kingdom. The now-famous “Monuments Men” searched for precious works of art that had been looted by the Nazis with the goal of returning items to their rightful owners. In contrast, TICOM teams followed Allied armies into occupied areas of Western Europe to seize material and equipment Axis powers used for code-breaking and code-making, including the German Enigma cipher. The teams also tried to determine how successful the Germans had been in breaking Allied codes.

Through these efforts, the United States and the United Kingdom aimed to read more of the encrypted communications of retreating Nazi armies and better protect their own information from German eavesdropping.

The declassified material is housed at the Archives II facility in College Park, MD. More information about how to locate records held by the National Archives is available at https://catalog.archives.gov/id/5957379.