Holocaust archives unsealed
Scholars, survivors and families to have access to detailed files
Fri Nov 17 2006 By Arthur Max
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BAD AROLSEN, Germany -- The 21-year-old Russian sat before a clerk of the U.S. Army Judge Advocate's office, describing the furnaces at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where he had been a prisoner until a few weeks previously.
"I saw with my own eyes how thousands of Jews were gassed daily and thrown by the hundreds into pits where Jews were burning," he said.
"I saw how little children were killed with sticks and thrown into the fire," he continued. Blood flowed in gutters, and "Jews were thrown in and died there"; more were taken off trucks and cast alive into the flames.
Today, the Holocaust's horrors are known in dense and painful detail. Yet the young Russian's words leap off the faded onionskin page with a rawness that transports the reader back to April 1945, when the Second World War was still raging and the world still knew little about gas chambers, genocide and the Final Solution.
The two pages of testimony, in a file randomly plucked off a shelf, are among millions of documents held by the International Tracing Service, or ITS, an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross which was mandated after the Second World War to trace missing persons and help families reunite.
This vast archive -- nearly 26 kilometres of files in six a former barracks of the Waffen-SS in a German spa town -- contains the fullest records of Nazi persecutions in existence. But because of concerns about the victims' privacy, the ITS has kept the files closed to the public for half a century, dribbling out information on a strict need-to-know basis.
In May, after years of pressure from survivors' groups, the 11 countries overseeing the archive agreed to unseal the files for scholars, as well as victims and their families.
"This is powerful stuff," said Paul Shapiro of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, who was allowed to look at the files.
"If you sat here for a day and read these files, you'd get a picture of what it was really like in the camps, how people were treated. Look -- names and names of kapos, guards -- the little perpetrators," he said.
When the archive is finally available, which could take a year or more, researchers will have their first chance to see a unique collection of documents on concentration camps, slave labour camps and displaced persons. From emotionless lists and heartrending testimony, a skilled historian may be able to see the 20th century's darkest years through the eyes of its millions of victims.
"There is a great deal of very interesting material on a very large number of concentration camps that we really don't know much about," said Yehuda Bauer, professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "It may contain surprises. We don't know. It has material that nobody's ever seen."
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Scholars, survivors and families to have access to detailed files
Fri Nov 17 2006 By Arthur Max
Article Link
BAD AROLSEN, Germany -- The 21-year-old Russian sat before a clerk of the U.S. Army Judge Advocate's office, describing the furnaces at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where he had been a prisoner until a few weeks previously.
"I saw with my own eyes how thousands of Jews were gassed daily and thrown by the hundreds into pits where Jews were burning," he said.
"I saw how little children were killed with sticks and thrown into the fire," he continued. Blood flowed in gutters, and "Jews were thrown in and died there"; more were taken off trucks and cast alive into the flames.
Today, the Holocaust's horrors are known in dense and painful detail. Yet the young Russian's words leap off the faded onionskin page with a rawness that transports the reader back to April 1945, when the Second World War was still raging and the world still knew little about gas chambers, genocide and the Final Solution.
The two pages of testimony, in a file randomly plucked off a shelf, are among millions of documents held by the International Tracing Service, or ITS, an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross which was mandated after the Second World War to trace missing persons and help families reunite.
This vast archive -- nearly 26 kilometres of files in six a former barracks of the Waffen-SS in a German spa town -- contains the fullest records of Nazi persecutions in existence. But because of concerns about the victims' privacy, the ITS has kept the files closed to the public for half a century, dribbling out information on a strict need-to-know basis.
In May, after years of pressure from survivors' groups, the 11 countries overseeing the archive agreed to unseal the files for scholars, as well as victims and their families.
"This is powerful stuff," said Paul Shapiro of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, who was allowed to look at the files.
"If you sat here for a day and read these files, you'd get a picture of what it was really like in the camps, how people were treated. Look -- names and names of kapos, guards -- the little perpetrators," he said.
When the archive is finally available, which could take a year or more, researchers will have their first chance to see a unique collection of documents on concentration camps, slave labour camps and displaced persons. From emotionless lists and heartrending testimony, a skilled historian may be able to see the 20th century's darkest years through the eyes of its millions of victims.
"There is a great deal of very interesting material on a very large number of concentration camps that we really don't know much about," said Yehuda Bauer, professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "It may contain surprises. We don't know. It has material that nobody's ever seen."
More on link
