Nazi archive to be made public for the first time

``That was Hitler's birthday. The camp commandant did it as a birthday gift for him,'' Jost said.

German Holocaust archive to be opened
Tue May 16, 2006 3:33 PM ET


BERLIN (Reuters) - A German archive containing millions of documents from the Second World War will be opened to historians and Holocaust scholars for the first time.

The 11-nation committee which oversees the International Tracing Service (ITS) agreed in Luxembourg on Tuesday to change its mandate to allow historians to mine the information it contains, Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, said in a statement.

"Yad Vashem welcomes the decision by the International Commission for the ITS to open the archives at Bad Arolsen in Germany," it said in a statement.

After decades in dark, remnants of stolen lives to finally be seen

Largest collection of Nazi death camp records to be opened up to historians

Kate Connolly in Bad Arolsen
Monday March 12, 2007
The Guardian

Cornelis Brouwenstijn was forced to surrender his black leather wallet when he entered Neuengamme concentration camp in northern Germany in 1944. Inside it the 22-year-old, a handsome blond Dutch Jew, had tucked his passport, ration cards, some curly-edged photographs of family and friends and a love poem typed on two sides of an onion-skin page: "Ode to a Girl", whose "skin is clear as glass".
Brouwenstijn's now crumbling wallet is one of hundreds stored in brown envelopes marked "effects" at the Red Cross International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen, central Germany. Other envelopes contain everyday objects such as a bronze powder press, whose pale pink contents briefly cloud the air when opened, a tiny lipstick embossed with the words "kiss proof", and a white rosary.


These trinkets and bits of paper are, in thousands of cases, the only remnants of lives that ended, as Brouwenstijn's did, at the hands of the Nazis, the envelopes protecting their memories.
Before the end of this year, the fragmented stories of 17.5 million individuals held in concentration and slave labour camps during the second world war are due to be revealed to historians and academics for the first time.

For decades the ITS - founded in 1943 to search for "displaced persons" - has restricted access to the largest collection of Nazi death camp records to survivors. Even so, many of their requests for information have taken years to be answered.

But last year the 11-country committee that controls the ITS voted to open up the records. Now the committee has set procedures in motion to open the files before the end of this year, once a ratification process has been completed.

In preparation, all the archive's 50m documents are in the process of being digitised and indexed for electronic use by the ITS's 330 workers, in what will amount to 7,000 gigabytes of data.

This week the Guardian was given access to the vast storehouse, with contents stretching across 16 miles of shelving.

The archivists say it is unlikely that the Bad Arolsen collection will throw any new light on the Holocaust. But studying even a fraction of the mass of information, recorded meticulously by Nazi bureaucrats - and sometimes prisoners - with the aid of typewriters, pencils or ink, on everything from the mundane to the extraordinary, allows a vivid picture to emerge of a vast number of lost lives.

Punishments

In one file randomly plucked from a shelf, there is a report by a doctor from Ljubljana held at Dachau describing a regular punishment inflicted on prisoners by their SS guards. "They tied their hands behind their backs and suspended them from the branches of the trees by their wrists so that their feet were off the ground," he wrote. "This procedure would usually take place around 11am so that every prisoner had a chance to see the men hanging when they went to the mess."

A file on Melk, a sub-camp of Mauthausen in Austria, contains a sketch by a Swiss dentist showing where he buried the personal possessions of deceased prisoners for safekeeping.

Among the more famous of the documents is "Schindler's List", which details the identities of the more than 1,000 men and women saved by industrialist Oskar Schindler, including glaziers, doctors, engineers, and seamstresses.

"Annelies Maria Sara Frank" - how the Nazis listed the young diarist Anne Frank - leaps off the page of the alphabetical list No 40 of deportations to Westerbork. Her final destination is left blank - as is known, she perished in Bergen-Belsen.

It is an archive with many tales to tell. One of the most shocking is a neat handwritten report within the pages of a frayed ledger from Mauthausen which describes how on the orders of the Reich security department in Berlin, 300 people were shot in the neck between 11.20am and 12.54pm on April 20 1942, as a present for Hitler on his 53rd birthday. All 300 names are listed.

Records for the camp Gross-Rosen in Poland, about which few documents exist, detail head lice controls, including prisoner numbers and the precise number of lice they had. These records have provided some survivors with their only piece of written evidence that they were in a camp at all, evidence which has proved vital in several compensation claims.

Records for Buchenwald give a glimpse into the bizarre day-to-day workings of the camps. A so-called "manpower report" reveals that seven hairdressers and 252 tailors were at work in the camp on January 8 1940.

There are also detailed reports of the Death Marches - the Nazi attempts to move prisoners from camps to the German heartland at the end of the war - pieced together from eyewitness accounts, detailing how many perished along the way.

The German government has been accused by critics, including Holocaust survivor groups, of refusing to open up Bad Arolsen due to fears that any move to make the information more widely available outside Germany would result in it facing further compensation claims, adding to the £42bn it has already paid to victims of the Nazi regime.

Paul Shapiro, director of the Centre for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, went so far as to say that "preventing researchers from having access to the Holocaust documents is in itself a form of Holocaust denial".

Last generation

Others say it is urgent that the archive is opened because the last generation of Holocaust survivors are now in their twilight years, and not least because the Holocaust has become so institutionalised. But the ITS, which last year received 200,000 requests for information, insists that the reluctance is due to concern about data protection, and that it is only abiding by German law. This German propensity to do things by the book is also used to explain the fact that while it is described as a confidential service to trace missing people, rather than an archive, Bad Arolsen's information remains out of bounds.

There are also concerns about protecting individuals. "There are cases in our files of priests accused of paedophilia, and whether true or not you would not want a family stumbling across such information," said ITS's spokeswoman, Maria Raabe.

Some files detail cases of hereditary and sexually transmitted diseases, which might be considered sensitive information. "And there are cases where people just don't want to be found - who deliberately disappeared after the war, or who don't want to be traced by an illegitimate child they gave birth to or fathered," she said. "We have a duty to protect their identities."

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.

Holocaust Survivor Learns Father's Fate

Wednesday January 16, 2008 8:16 PM

By ARON HELLER

Associated Press Writer

JERUSALEM (AP) - In 1942, 8-year-old Moshe Bar-Yuda walked hand-in-hand with his father to a collection point in his hometown in Slovakia and watched him being shipped off to a Nazi labor camp. The boy never saw him again, and for 66 years was left to wonder about his father's fate.

Because of a newly opened Nazi archive, the mystery has been resolved.

Bar-Yuda, now 74, was one of the first to obtain Nazi documents now available to the public after they were stashed away for more than 60 years in a secret German archive. Up to now, only limited queries were answered.

The Bad Arolsen documents - transportation lists, Gestapo orders, camp registers, slave labor booklets, death books - contain references to about 17.5 million people, Jews and non-Jews. It is the largest registry of Holocaust victims ever.

The archive showed that Bar-Yuda's father, Alfred Kastner, was killed in a Nazi gas chamber at the Majdanek death camp in Poland on Sept. 7, 1942, less than six months after his son watched him being taken away. Bar-Yuda said despite the tragic ending, he was grateful to finally have some closure and an exact date to recite Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.

``I don't want to say I feel terrible, and I don't want to say the word 'happy,' but I feel like this open wound has finally been closed,'' he said. ``It closed very sadly but at least it closed.''

About 6 million Jews were killed by German Nazis and their collaborators in the Holocaust of World War II.

In August, the International Tracing Service (ITS) of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which administers the archive, began transferring digital copies of its documents to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, and to the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw, Poland.

The vast archive of war records in the small German town of Bad Arolsen opened its doors to the public in November, giving historians and Holocaust survivors access to concentration camp records detailing Nazi horrors.

The ITS has completed digitizing some 50 million index cards from shelves that would stretch 16 miles long and fill a half-dozen buildings in Bad Arolsen. The remainder of the records, relating to slave labor and displaced persons camps, will be transferred in installments between 2008 and 2010, the agency said.

Yad Vashem said it would start accepting queries in February.

Bar-Yuda already has his answer. After reading about the opening of the archive, he turned to an old friend who worked at Yad Vashem and had been to Bad Arolsen, to find out if she could uncover any information about his father. Two weeks ago, he was handed the document that recorded his father's execution.

Alfred Kastner, number 2802, was executed in Majdanek.

Bar-Yuda, a retired journalist and envoy for the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, was hidden during the war with his mother and two siblings and later escaped to Palestine.

Other survivors said his father had perished, either in Majdanek or in the Auschwitz death camp. But there was nothing official and no records about him - beyond the one that showed he was deported from Bratislava on March 27, 1942.

``I've been trying to find out what happened to him. I didn't know anything,'' said Bar-Yuda, who recently wrote a book about his own Holocaust experience.

Bar-Yuda said knowing how his father's life ended was a great comfort after years of devastating uncertainty.

``The question marks are gone,'' he said. ``Now I know how to deal better with the knowledge, and not with the confusion.''

Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev said the Holocaust museum was speedily integrating the new material into its database in the hopes of providing more answers.

``This story illustrates how the millions of documents in Yad Vashem's archives, including the recently received documents from the ITS, allow us to be able to uncover the missing pieces of information, so that survivors and others will be able to finally complete the picture as to what happened to their loved ones during the Holocaust,'' he said.

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 ratified an accord in November that unsealed the archive.

Yad Vashem expects the second batch of material from Bad Arolsen to arrive later this year and to have the full copy of all the ITS records by 2010.

It recently uploaded a special online request form on its Web site, and encouraged survivors seeking material from the German registry to do so.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington also plans begin responding to requests for information made by Holocaust survivors and their families.

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On the Net:

Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial: www.yadvashem.org

Yad Vashem's ITS forms: http://www1.yadvashem.org/ITS-and-YADVASHEM/home.html

International Tracing Service: www.its-arolsen.org

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum www.ushmm.org