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Nazi Holocaust archives to be open this year

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published March 9, 2007

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - Moving more quickly than expected, the 11-nation body overseeing a long-secret archive of Nazi war records set procedures in motion Thursday to open millions of files on concentration camps and their victims before the end of the year.

Member nations made the decision knowing that within a year, 10 percent of all Holocaust survivors now living may be dead, one American archive director said.

The governing commission of the International Tracing Service, the storehouse of an estimated 30-million to 50-million pages documenting the Holocaust, concluded a two-day meeting with a set of recommendations for copying and transferring files to Holocaust institutions for use by survivors, victims' relatives and scholars.

The recommendations must be adopted at a formal meeting of the 11 countries in May.

Before the material can be accessed, however, all the member countries must ratify an agreement adopted last year to end a 60-year ban on using the files for research.

"I am hopeful this will happen in 2007," said J. Christian Kennedy, the U.S. special envoy for Holocaust issues, who led the U.S. delegation.

The files, stored in Bad Arolsen, Germany, have been used since the 1950s to help locate missing people or uncover the fate of those who disappeared during the Third Reich. Later, the files were also used to validate claims for compensation.

Only personnel of the Tracing Service, an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross, had access to the files.

After this week's meeting, the process to begin opening the files "is irreversible," said Reto Meister, director of the Tracing Service.

In a key move, the 11 delegations agreed that the Tracing Service should begin electronically transferring scanned files before the ratification process is complete, Meister said.

Institutions on the receiving end, such as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Israel's Yad Vashem memorial, will need several months to prepare the data for public use.

While much has been written about the Holocaust, scholars say the Bad Arolsen files will fill in gaps in history and provide a unique perspective gained from seeing original Nazi letters, the minutiae of the concentration camps' structures, slave labor records and uncounted testimonies of victims and ordinary Germans who witnessed the brutality of the Gestapo.

About 12-million people - half of them Jews - were systematically exterminated by the Nazis, and tens of millions more were incarcerated, displaced or forced to work for the German war machine.

The Bad Arolsen archives are the world's most complete record of individual suffering during the Holocaust.

In the last 60 years, the Tracing Service has responded to 11-million requests from survivors and their families. The overwhelming number of inquiries led to delays lasting years and resulted in only the sketchiest of replies. Once the files are available in Washington, Jerusalem and other locations, survivors will be able to search for information under the rules of each archive.

By the numbers 

30-million number of pages in all

13-million pages of concentration camp death registers, transportation lists and camp registries

16 miles the length the files fill in six buildings, in metal filing cabinets and cardboard binders

11-million information requests the Tracing Service has gotten in the last 60 years

[Last modified March 9, 2007, 02:31:10]