 |
The International Tracing Service archive is the largest known record of Nazi persecutions.Last May, the commission overseeing the ITS agreed to open the files to researchers.
|
|
|
BERLIN (AFP)---Germany has handed over copies of more than 6.7 million documents relating to forced labour under the Nazis to museums in Israel, Poland and the United States.
The documents, which have just been digitised, concern an estimated 12 million people, 8.4 million of them civilians, used as slave labourers during World War II, according to the International Tracing Service (ITS) which is responsible for preserving the original data.
Copies of the documents were handed over to the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and to the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw for historical research.
"The documents attest to the monstrous dimension of slave labour during the National Socialist (Nazi) reign," according to Udo Jost, head of the ITS archives stored at Bad Arolsen, in central Germany.
"The (digisation) serves the protection and conservation of the original documents, and at the same time, it allows for better access to the documents, whether on location at ITS, or at one of our partner organisations in Israel, the US, or Poland," Jost said in a statement.
The documents handed over include individual employment records and registration cards. They also include lists, compiled in 1946 on the orders of the Western allies, which required local German authorities to provide details on all foreigners and German Jews held in their area during the war.
"The documents provide information on the living conditions of foreign workers and their deployment in specific regions or at individual companies,"
Jost said.
Over 70 percent of the documents stored at ITS have now been scanned and indexed, and full digitisation of the archives is expected to be completed by 2011.
The ITS is run by the International Committee of the Red Cross and an international commission made up of representatives from Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland and the United States.
