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| Nazi archives soon available to historians
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After 60 years of semi-secrecy, macabre records the Nazis kept of millions of their victims, detailing anything from executions to headlice and suspected homosexuality in prisoners, are to be made available to historians and researchers.
Eleven nations that share custody of millions of chilling files on victims of the Nazis were due to agree Tuesday to open the archives.
Germany gave the go ahead to amend the 1955 Bonn Agreements under which only victims and their relatives had the right to information from some 47 million documents held in the German hamlet of Bad Arolsen.
The government for decades resisted international pressure to open the files because they contain sensitive, and often derogatory, information and claims the Nazis recorded about their victims.
The aim of Germany's stringent privacy laws has been to keep sensitive information out of the wrong hands - especially in light of Nazi Germany's brutal history in dealing with information.
Many of the documents on file at the Bad Arolsen archive divulge information that victims and their families have been trying to keep under lock and key - especially compromising information such as that details surrounding sexually transmitted illnesses, the presumed homosexuality or a petty criminal record of the victim.
27 kilometres of shelf space
The documents at the International Tracing Service (ITS) at Bad Arolsen touch on the fates of some 17.5 million people and fill more than 27 kilometres of shelf space.
Among the records is a tattered hand-written report noting that 300 people were executed within a few hours at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria on April 20, 1942.
"It was Hitler's birthday and the commander of the camp ordered the executions as a present for him," explained Udo Jost, an administrator at the ITS, which is an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The ITS is the unit that has been responsible for locating lost family members in crisis zones. During and after the Second World War, they located the whereabouts of deported and murdered people for desperate relatives. In many instances they were responsible for reuniting families, after 1945.
Academics believe that while declassifying the files will not reveal dramatic new facts about the Holocaust, they will help throw more light on the plight of the Nazis' victims.
Anything new ?
"From a researcher's point of view, one cannot expect to discover anything fundamentally new in these documents," said Wolfgang Benz, the director of the Anti-Semitism Research Institute at Berlin's Technical University.
"Personally, I expect to find only minute details of which I have been unaware until now," he told Agence France Presse.
"American researchers who clamoured for the files to be opened, often did so for political reasons, and accused Germany of wanting to obscure its past,"
Benz added.
"But to do so is to forget that these documents contain potentially very sensitive information."
The compromising entries about individuals highlight the perversity of the Nazis' social policies.
There is a Gestapo arrest warrant stating that a woman was imprisoned because she refused to be sterilised after giving birth to a child of mixed race.
Another document describes a man made to do forced labour as "schizophrenic".
Jost said the Nazi records give no information about those sent to death camps except their names and deportation dates, but in concentration camps records were kept of minute details, right down to the clothes prisoners wore when they arrived.
"For those who were sent to death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, the only documents that we have are those noting the departure of the trains that carried them to the camps," he told AFP.
"In the concentration camps, everything was meticulously noted."
Jost said the ITS managed to provide a Russian man in his seventies with proof that he was held at the Gross Rosen concentration camp in present-day Poland, because the Nazis had kept a record of prisoners who had headlice.
"We could help him for the singular reason that one day in December
1944 they found two lice in his hair."
Over the decades, some 300 staff at the ITS have finecombed its files to respond to written requests from victims and their families.
"We could, for example, help somebody to qualify for compensation, by proving that he was held in a certain camp or forced to work in a certain factory," said ITS spokeswoman Maria Raabe.
The service's work has been overseen by 11 nations, including Britain, France, Israel, Germany, Greece and the United States, who agreed after World War II that surviving Nazi files should be sent to and held at Bad Arolsen.
Last month, Germany dropped its objection to opening the archives, saying the process should be completed within six months.
Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries said Berlin agreed because it believed privacy laws were now strong enough to protect the rights of those concerned.
Historians will be able to use Bad Arolsen as a database to establish, for example, how many Holocaust victims were held at a certain camp at a given time.
Yet, Jost said, most of the information is already known and the archives will merely serve to confirm the facts.
"Fortunately, historians have worked hard in the past 60 years," he said.
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