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From the Associated
Press

Nations Move to Open Nazi
Archives

Friday March 9, 2007
2:31 AM

By ARTHUR MAX

Associated Press Writer

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) - 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 the 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.

Israel, the United States, Poland and the Netherlands have completed
ratification, and Germany, Britain and Luxembourg told the meeting they
would ratify before the commission meets again in May.

But national elections in France and Belgium could cause delays in
those countries, officials said, and the status of ratification in Italy
and Greece was unclear.

The files, stored in Bad Arolsen, Germany, have been used since the
1950s to help locate missing persons or uncover the fate of people 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, which fill 16 miles
of gray metal filing cabinets and cardboard binders in six nondescript
buildings in the central German resort town.

After this week's meeting, the process of opening the files ``is
irreversible,'' said Reto Meister, director of the Tracing Service, who
briefed the commission on the archive's preparations to share the files.

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

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

Much discussion focused on the timetable of ratification. At one point,
when several countries moved back their estimated time frames, ``I got up
and reminded them that in one year 10 percent of survivors will die,''
said Paul Shapiro, director of the Washington Museum's Center for Advanced
Holocaust Studies.

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 index 17.5 million names that appear in its files, making them
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, but 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 normal rules of each archive.

Meister said the collection of documents on concentration camp
incarcerations - some 13 million pages of death registers, transportation
lists and camp registries - will be ready in June. The rest of the
documents will be scanned and transferred within a year.

Germany, which funds the Tracing Service, agreed to increase its
allocation beginning next year to help offset the $3.2 million needed to
speed up the digitization and transfer of files. The U.S. Holocaust Museum
also will provide an unspecified amount, Kennedy said.

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