Bletchley Park (aka STATION X), is placing its archives online. Now this will be fun. I’m a big fan of Bletchely Park, and it is one place I would love to visit. As you probably know, Bletchley Park was the site of the Allies effort to break the German “unbreakable” Enigma code during World War II. Here “The Father of Computing,” Alan Turing and friends developed mathematical techniques, along with some of the earliest computers, such as the Bombe and the Colossus, to literally save the world. It’s an amazing place, much like Manhattan Project.

I could go on and on about the Enigma machines, and how I long to own one, but not just any one. As anyone who as ever watchied the Antiques Roadshow knows, provenance is everything. I want Mick Jagger’s Enigma machine.

But back the topic at hand…

The Bletchley Park Trust owns the archives of the decrypted Nazi intercepts and wants to digitize them and put them online. I would love a search engine for this. Sort of like a data.gov of the Third Reich. Simon Greenish, CEO of the trust, said that a cursory look through the intercepts showed evidence of heavy traffic between the Nazis and ostensibly neutral countries like Switzerland, Spain, and Sweden. Mysteriously, there’s one intercept talking about shipping 4400 tons of mercury from Germany to Spain. Why this was shipped, hasn’t been determined yet. Hopefully after the archive is digitized, it will be.