# Lock Up These Papers, an OWI poster for government offices

Lock Up These Papers is OWI Poster No. 72, dated 1945. Three official envelopes marked Secret, Confidential, and Restricted sit under the warning "The enemy is vigilant" (NAID 513649).

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      Lock up these papers: The enemy is vigilant

      Lock Up These Papers, an OWI poster for government offices
      OWI Poster No. 72, 1945: three envelopes marked Secret, Confidential, Restricted, and the line "The enemy is vigilant." NAID 513649, Record Group 44.

## Techniques named on the archive record

Fear appeal
      Date1945Made byOffice of War Information (OWI Poster No. 72)MediumPosterCountryUnited StatesRegimeRoosevelt AdministrationNARANAID 513649; Record Group 44SourceIdentified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they areSourceU.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters , retrieved October 4, 2026SourcePublic domain (U.S. government work) Office of War Information. National Archives and Records Administration, RG 44, 44-PA-206 (NAID 513649).
      Object, image, and catalog record from the FRAME archive. Text on this page is CC BY 4.0. Image rights are as the archive records.

      Full record at propagandaarchive.org

  Lock Up These Papers is OWI Poster No. 72, dated 1945. Three official envelopes marked Secret, Confidential, and Restricted sit under the warning "The enemy is vigilant" (NAID 513649).

## What the poster prints

The picture is three envelopes on a dark ground, each stamped with one of the three classification words and each pointed at by a red arrow. The envelopes carry the printed franking of a Washington office. The transcription notes that part of that franking is garbled in print.

LOCK UP THESE PAPERS

SECRET

CONFIDENTIAL

RESTRICTED

THE ENEMY IS VIGILANT

[envelope text, partly garbled in print:] OFFICE OF [illegible] / WASHINGTON, D.C. / OFFICIAL BUSINESS / PENALTY FOR PRIVATE USE TO AVOID PAYMENT OF POSTAGE, $300

[imprint:] OWI Poster No. 72. Additional copies may be obtained upon request from the Division of Public Inquiries, Office of War Information, Washington, D.C. U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1945 -O- 533456

Transcription in the FRAME record. Full record at propagandaarchive.org. NAID 513649, Record Group 44, local id 44-PA-206.

## Who issued it

The Office of War Information issued it under its own number, 72, and offered extra copies through its Division of Public Inquiries. That line is a clue to where the sheet was meant to hang. Envelopes with official franking are office objects, which suggests an audience of people who handled government paper, though the archive records the audience simply as the domestic public.

## How to read it

Of the security posters on this site, this is the narrowest. It does not ask the public to stop talking. It asks clerks to put classified papers away. The archive tags it fear appeal, because "the enemy is vigilant" is asserted rather than shown, and no specific loss is named.

That tag is fair. It is also fair to say that the instruction itself was sound. A government has a duty to protect real military secrets, and asking its own employees to lock a drawer is the least intrusive way to do it. The civil-liberties concern with wartime secrecy is about what gets stamped secret and why, and about whether classification later hides mistakes from the voters. This poster does not touch that question. It takes the stamps as given.

The OWI poster series and its numbering are covered on the Office of War Information hub and in the poster index. A broader security appeal from 1944 is Don't Kill Her Daddy. The case study on the Office of War Information's domestic branch covers the office whose domestic branch issued posters like this one.

## Sources

- FRAME object record, Lock up these papers: The enemy is vigilant, 1945. Office of War Information (OWI Poster No. 72). U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, NAID 513649, 44-PA-206, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/collection/lock-up-these-papers-owi-1945/