Huge Nazi archive opens, ending over 60 years of secrecy

Warehouse in Germany offers vast resources

Few outsiders were allowed to see the documents, which number more than 50 million pages and cover 16 miles of filing cabinets and cardboard binders in the German town of Bad Arolsen. (MARTIN OESER/AFP/Getty Images/file)

AMSTERDAM - After more than 60 years, Nazi documents stored in a vast warehouse in Germany were unsealed yesterday, opening a rich resource for Holocaust historians and for survivors to delve into their own tormented past.

The treasure of documents could open new avenues of study into the inner workings of Nazi persecution, from the exploitation of slave labor to the conduct of medical experiments.

The archive's managers planned a conference of scholars next year to map out its unexplored contents.

The files entrusted to the International Tracing Service, an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross, have been used until now to help find missing persons or document atrocities to support compensation claims.

The US government also has referred to the tracing service for background checks on immigrants it suspected of lying about their past.

The archive's 400 staff members in the German spa town of Bad Arolsen handled inquiries. Few outsiders were allowed to see the actual documents, which number more than 50 million pages and cover 16 miles of gray metal filing cabinets and cardboard binders spread over six buildings.

The Red Cross and the German government announced yesterday that the last of the 11 countries that govern the archive had ratified a 2006 agreement to open the files to the public for the first time.

"We are there. The doors are open," said International Tracing Service director Reto Meister, speaking by telephone from the Buchenwald concentration camp where he was visiting with a delegation of US congressional staff members.

Survivors have pressed for decades to open the archive, unhappy with the minimal responses - usually in form letters - from Red Cross officials responding to requests for information about relatives.

"We are very anxious," said David Mermelstein, 78, an activist for survivors' causes in Miami, who wants to scour the files for traces of his two older brothers whom he last saw as he passed through a series of concentration camps.

"Now I hope we will be able to get some information. We have been waiting, and time is not on our side," said the retired businessman.

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem began receiving digital copies of the entire archive in August, allowing survivors and historians more access points.

Izzy Arbeiter, 82, the head of a Boston-area survivor's organization, said he hoped to go to the museum next month to browse the files.

"My goodness, I don't know where I would start, there are so many things I am interested in," he said.

"The history of my family, of course. My parents. One of my brothers is missing. We never knew what happened to him."

Yad Vashem said the opening of the archive was "a breakthrough" for survivors and others.

"Our understanding and knowledge of the personal story of the Holocaust will be deepened," said Yad Vashem's chairman, Avner Shalev.

The records are unlikely to change the general story of the Holocaust and the Nazi era, probably the most intensely researched 12-year period of the 20th century.

But its depth of detail and original documentation will add texture to history's worst genocide, and is likely to fuel a revival of academic interest in the Holocaust.

Among its files, seen by the Associated Press during repeated visits to Bad Arolsen in the last year, are the list of deportees from the Netherlands to Auschwitz on which Anne Frank's name appears, the list of employees of Oskar Schindler's factory who were sheltered from death, medical records showing the number of lice on the heads of prisoners, and the list of inmates evacuated by the Nazis from the Neuengamme labor camp who later died on prisoner boats mistakenly bombed by the British air force.