The type was originally the Blohm & Voss P 161.01, then BV 238 Land before finally receiving its own designation - BV 250. The project report was presumably printed up just before the redesignation. The outside front cover has the correct designation but the internal title page appears to have been manually amended.
On the point about 'without writing FOIA letters to every agency in the U.S., I am lost as to where to look', this may seem a bit obvious, but have you tried Googling 'captured German WW2 documents'?
Or get some existing books on the topic and look at the footnotes, where available, which show the sources referenced and where they came from.
Interesting. I will have to keep an eye out.
Not to be rude my friend, but if it were as simple as Googling it, I'd have it by now haha. XD
I have dug through dozens of TICOM, SIGINT, OKW, Telefunken/Siemens documents, museum/archivist catalogs, books or articles, and found nothing more than a few mentions here and there. I know how the machine works, I know its weaknesses and so on, that information is available... however the actual file itself, the actual classification, and documentation are elusive. The big question is where did it come from? Compared to what I can readily find on the T-52, SG-39, SG-41 & SG-41z, SZ-40, SZ-42, and the well-known Enigma, the information on the T-43 is severely lacking, and lacking an origin too.
The only good lead I have (what most people credit in their footnotes) is a German author(?) by the name of Jozef Langer. His account of the machines' whereabouts postwar is why I figure FOIA is my best option, as he claims how the U.S. ended up with the majority of the examples, where they found their new home in the state of Maryland. Trust me, I checked his bibliography too. What puzzles me further is that not a single example of the machine has turned up, anywhere, since war's end, compared to all the other machines that see many examples in both private and public hands. You would think a museum, somewhere, would have one given the number that was recovered. Hell, even Norway ended up with at least 1 if I remember correctly... yet, there is nothing. I thought I found one for auction once, but come to find out, it was a misidentified T-37. I even contacted Bletchley Park museum and was surprised that the staff was equally perplexed as I was. Part of me wonders if, for whatever reason, the machine is still classified in the U.S.? But what about the U.K.? Since all the information that I can find on the T-43 leads back to a German source, it's likely that the origin is not declassified American intel, but maybe Siemens itself. Either that, or it is so buried in red tape, that no one as of yet has dug it up. I do not know. I have practically anything and everything archived, minus a few rare eggs here and there like the BV-250, however, the T-43 is like a white whale to me.
