Germanys Holocaust archive at Bad Arolsen to be made public

Holocaust archives maintained by the Nazis during WWII will be made available to the survivors and researchers alike, the International Tracing service which maintains the archive at Bad Arolsen in Germany, has announced.

New York, Aug 5 : Holocaust archives maintained by the Nazis during WWII will be made available to the survivors and researchers alike, the International Tracing service which maintains the archive at Bad Arolsen in Germany, has announced.

The Nazis kept meticulous records of their mass extermination during WWII and much of it ended up here in this tranquil town in Northern Hesse.

Now, on Aug. 20, the archive will transfer digital copies of the first major trove of documents to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and to the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem.

The files cover 51 concentration camps and prisons, and include transportation lists, medical reports, entry documents and Gestapo prison records. Some 10 million documents in all, they will represent a third of the entire collection at Bad Arolsen.

Prying open the doors of Bad Arolsen has not been an easy task though. Italy, France, and Greece, three of the 11 countries that oversee the institution, have not yet ratified an amended treaty that would give historians unfettered access to the archive.

However, in May 2007, the 11 countries, including Germany and the US, agreed to begin the electronic transfer even before the last three countries ratify the treaty.

"We have interpreted the decision in a way that there is no turning back. It became very evident that the I.T.S. had to change because the victims wanted it to change," said Reto Meister, the director of the tracing service.

Outside experts on the Holocaust, who have long pushed for more access, have said Meister has been remarkably successful in his endeavour.

"I have a good deal of admiration for how far he's moved the place. He's dealing with a staff that, for a very long time, operated in a closed and secretive manner. He also has to balance multiple forces," said Paul Shapiro, the director of advanced Holocaust studies at the museum in Washington.

Incidentally, the German government, which pays nearly 20 million dollars a year for the upkeep of the tracing service and its 320 employees, had opposed granting wider access to the archive until last year.

Berlin had said opening the archive would violate privacy standards.

According to a New York Times report, the documents include confidential personal information, like reports of medical experiments carried out on prisoners, and accusations of murder and homosexuality made by the Nazis to discredit people.

Victorious Allied forces discovered much of the material when they liberated the concentration camps at the end of the war.

The files were dumped in a complex of vacated SS barracks in Bad Arolsen, which was conveniently located near the border dividing the American and British occupation zones.

ANI