The Oss and the Nazi occupation of the Baltic states, 1941–1945: A note on documentation

Abstract

On 11 July 1941, as German forces advanced on Tallinn (Reval) to complete the conquest of the Baltic states, President Franklin D. Roosevelt formally established the Office of the Coordinator of Information, the United States' first centralized intelligence organization. Though this agency later expanded and evolved into the better-known Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the task of collecting and evaluating all manner of intelligence data had already begun: before the end of July the new department received from British intelligence an account of the Lithuanian uprising against Soviet rule shortly after the German invasion.1 The volume of data collected grew as the war progressed, so that the OSS records furnished to intelligence analysts then as to historians today not only military intelligence, but a portrait of life in Occupied Europe as well: the structure and nature of German occupation policies, collaboration, resistance, and survival. The value of these records increases for those occupied areas where the original German source materials were destroyed or are largely unavailable to scholars, as in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania today. As a research aid to these materials, this article provides a listing of OSS records in the National Archives, Washington, D.C., which pertain to the Baltic states under Nazi occupation, 1941-1945.