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Ending 60 years of secrecy, vast Nazi archive opens to public
Wednesday, November 28, 2007 | No comments posted.
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) — A vast archive of German war records opened its doors to the public Wednesday, giving historians and Holocaust survivors who have waited more than 60 years access to concentration camp records detailing Nazi horrors.
The 11 countries that oversee the archive of the International Tracing Service have finished ratifying an accord unsealing some 50 million pages kept in the German town of Bad Arolsen, ITS director Reto Meister said Wednesday.
“The ratification process is complete,” said Meister, whose organization is part of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
“We are there. The doors are open,” he said, speaking by telephone while visiting the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial with a delegation of U.S. congressional staff members.
Greece was the last of the 11 to formally file its ratification papers with the German Foreign Ministry. Poland, which holds the rotating chairmanship of the International Commission governing the archive, now must inform the ICRC that the ratification is complete, the final step in the process.
Until now, the archive had been used exclusively to trace missing persons, reunite families and provide documentation to victims of Nazi persecution to support compensation claims. The U.S. government also has referred to the ITS for background checks on immigrants it suspected of lying about their past.
The records are unlikely to change the general knowledge of the Holocaust and the Nazi era, probably the most intensely researched 12-year period of the 20th century.
But its depth of detail and original documentation will add texture and detail to history’s worst genocide, and is likely to fuel a revival of academic interest in the Holocaust.
It also will help satisfy a hunger among Holocaust survivors and victims’ families to know more about their own backgrounds and the fate of loved ones. The archive’s index refers to 17.5 million people in its 16 linear miles of files.
Allied forces began collecting the documents even before the end of the war, and eventually entrusted them to the Red Cross. The archive has been governed since 1955 by a commission that normally met once a year.
The commission members are the United States, Britain, Germany, Israel, Poland, France, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
The 11 countries that oversee the archive of the International Tracing Service have finished ratifying an accord unsealing some 50 million pages kept in the German town of Bad Arolsen, ITS director Reto Meister said Wednesday.
“The ratification process is complete,” said Meister, whose organization is part of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
“We are there. The doors are open,” he said, speaking by telephone while visiting the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial with a delegation of U.S. congressional staff members.
Greece was the last of the 11 to formally file its ratification papers with the German Foreign Ministry. Poland, which holds the rotating chairmanship of the International Commission governing the archive, now must inform the ICRC that the ratification is complete, the final step in the process.
Until now, the archive had been used exclusively to trace missing persons, reunite families and provide documentation to victims of Nazi persecution to support compensation claims. The U.S. government also has referred to the ITS for background checks on immigrants it suspected of lying about their past.
The records are unlikely to change the general knowledge of the Holocaust and the Nazi era, probably the most intensely researched 12-year period of the 20th century.
But its depth of detail and original documentation will add texture and detail to history’s worst genocide, and is likely to fuel a revival of academic interest in the Holocaust.
It also will help satisfy a hunger among Holocaust survivors and victims’ families to know more about their own backgrounds and the fate of loved ones. The archive’s index refers to 17.5 million people in its 16 linear miles of files.
Allied forces began collecting the documents even before the end of the war, and eventually entrusted them to the Red Cross. The archive has been governed since 1955 by a commission that normally met once a year.
The commission members are the United States, Britain, Germany, Israel, Poland, France, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
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