Censorship is never a good thing? Almost never, and I'll agree, but I'd say anyone, anyone at all, should've been (and probably was) prevented from publicly sharing this one in 1942:

"The Allies have broken Enigma. For that matter, when the German Navy added another wheel to Enigma, they broke that one too. They've been accurately reading most every German military and naval communique for oh, a good year or two now. Oh, yeah, and they're developing a digital computer the like of which the world's never seen to keep breaking codes. German codes are pretty much permanently compromised at this point. Oh, and by the way, they've broken the Japanese' Purple code, as well."

Now, I think it's a terrible injustice that all of the Colossus computers were destroyed to preserve these state secrets after the war, and that for decades we were fed the lie that ENIAC was the first digital computer, but all things in their time and place. For anyone to state the above during the war would've been the highest treason imaginable.

There have always been, even in the most democratic societies, and probably will always need to be, at least some limits on the boundaries of free speech. These limits must be as absolutely few as possible, and extremely narrowly defined.

And, to stay (or get back) on topic, I can't imagine a single song, however odious and offensive, that warrants absolute censorship and removal from all archives and records. I can certainly understand the impulse in immediate post-war Germany to ban the Horst Wessel Lied; the legacy of Nazism was an open wound from Stalingrad to the Pyrynees, and remained so for a very long time. But even such a ban must be relaxed eventually, if only to prevent contemporary followers of the Corporal from making a martyr of Horst all over again.

Shad