How missing Admiralty records should shape historical claims

Matthew Seligman's criticism of sweeping naval revisionism separates missing archival material from evidence of a deliberate cover-up. Admiralty indexes can establish that particular files once existed even when the files themselves were destroyed, but silence in the surviving record cannot automatically prove a suppressed policy. This framework matters because Operation Berlin has attracted claims that Britain secretly manipulated the raid. It gives viewers a practical test for separating documented archival loss from an argument built mainly on absence.