Why some Second World War intelligence secrets may remain lost

Will historians ever uncover the last major intelligence secrets of the Second World War?

Probably not. Records can be deliberately or casually destroyed, leaving historians dependent on incomplete catalogues and scattered private archives.

There is no reason to expect a final revelation of every intelligence secret from the Second World War. Official files can be destroyed deliberately or simply discarded because no one recognizes their future value. Catalogues and directory references may survive even when the documents they list do not. Researchers must then follow participants into personal collections at separate archives, recovering only fragments and accepting that some operations can never be reconstructed completely.