A filing cabinet containing original documents with information about prisoners of the former concentration camp of Auschwitz at the International Tracing Service in the German town of Bad Arolsen, May 10, 2006. The archive will be opened to historians and Holocaust scholars for the first time, officials said Wednesday.
(REUTERS/Alex Grimm)
Nations agree to open up German Nazi archive
BERLIN (Reuters) - A German archive containing millions of documents detailing Nazi crimes during World War Two will be opened to historians and Holocaust scholars for the first time, officials said on Wednesday.
In an official ceremony to mark the decision, Germany's junior minister for foreign affairs, Guenter Gloser, welcomed the decision by his own country and the 10 other nations who oversee the archive's administration to open up the files for research.
"With the decision to change the protocol (governing the archive) we are bringing a long process to an end," Gloser said, noting that Germany had overcome its difficulties on reconciling the release of the data with its tough privacy laws.
The archive, housed in the west German town of Bad Arolsen, is the world's biggest collection of documents relating to the Second World War and Hitler's National Socialist party.
It contains up to 50 million documents on some 17 million individuals and is expected to shed new light on the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews across Europe were murdered.
"This is the consequence of a long process which will give researchers access to additional materials which can help us explain National Socialism," Israel's ambassador to Germany, Shimon Stein, said.
The International Tracing Service (ITS), the archive's official name, is part of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
Agreement was needed from all 11 nations to change the archive's mandate to allow it to open up the files to researchers and historians. Copies of the archives' contents will be given to the 11 countries who in turn may grant access to them to scholars.
Germany's concerns over data protection were allayed by guarantees that information on those still living would remain restricted.
Israel, Britain, France, Greece, the United States, Germany, Luxembourg and Italy all signed the amended protocol on Wednesday. Poland, Belgium and the Netherlands require further parliamentary approval and have until November 1 to sign.
© Copyright 2006 Reuters. Reuters content is the intellectual property of Reuters or its third-party content providers. Any copying, republication, or redistribution of Reuters content, including by caching, framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.
