Nazi Archive Has Millions of Victim Names

[Jolie Rouge]

Nazi Archive Has Millions of Victim Names
By MATT MOORE, Associated Press Writer
53 minutes ago

BAD AROLSEN, Germany - Row upon row of metal cabinets at the International Tracing Service hold the key to the lives — and deaths — of 17.5 million of Adolf Hitler's victims.

Much of it is simple, stark facts — a name on a concentration camp death list — while other information is more descriptive: accounts of mental illness, real or imputed homosexuality, medical records, even the presence of head lice.

Privacy concerns have held up the opening of the center's 30 million documents to historians and the public, a restriction that could end soon under pressure from Holocaust researchers and Jewish organizations.

In a key breakthrough, the German government said Tuesday it was ready to work with the United States on the issue, though no final agreement has been reached.

Maria Raabe, assistant to the center's director, said it will ultimately be up to the 11 countries that oversee the archive — Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Israel, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Britain and the United States. Their representatives meet May 16 in Luxembourg.

"It's there that a decision will be taken on opening the archives and in what way," she said. "We have very delicate and sensitive information about illness, homosexuality, dementia."

One card shows the name of a Frenchman taken to Norway and forced to work as a carpenter building a submarine pen for the German navy. Another lists a Hungarian said to suffer from schizophrenia. Another bears the name of a German imprisoned at Buchenwald for saying anti-Nazi slogans and freed on orders of the U.S. Army on May 7, 1945 — the day the war ended.

Many of the records are registration documents, ID cards or lists. Yet they provide powerful testimony to the lives and deaths of those imprisoned, forced to work for German industry or killed in concentration camps during World War II.

The agency, which opened in 1943 in London and moved to Germany in 1945, helps relatives of Nazi victims discover their fates.

More than 50 million references to the victims have been catalogued, cross-referenced and, in most cases, digitally scanned to form a huge database. Some 150,000 requests were dealt with last year alone.

It is by far the most complete listing of those who suffered in World War II, said Udo Jost, archive manager for the International Tracing Service.

Some death camps "didn't have much use for records," Jost told The Associated Press. In some cases, documents were destroyed by the Nazis as the Russians advanced from the east and the Allies from the west.

Other camps were ardent record keepers. Mauthausen, in Austria, diligently recorded the deaths of its inmates, listing them by name, serial and prisoner number, as well as place and date of birth.

"It also shows how they died," Jost said, displaying the camp's Totenbuch, or Death Book, for 1942 and 1943. "These prisoners were killed every two minutes with a shot to the back of the head."

In a few hours, 300 were executed on April 20, 1942. "That was Hitler's birthday. The camp commandant did it as a birthday gift for him," Jost said.

The Nazis documented everything from the mundane — how many meals a forced laborer received — to the horrific, describing prisoners' deaths in painstaking detail.

People requesting information about themselves or relatives are given priority, as do the elderly or sick, and those seeking information for legal settlements.

Still, it takes 3 1/2 years on average, Raabe said. "Some are seeking information on relatives who were taken to Germany to work and then emigrated after the war to somewhere else," she said. "Others need to prove that they were in a concentration camp."

When a family member is seeking a lost relative, the agency tries to track down that person. Most times it is successful, but not everyone is eager to be found. "When that happens, we notify them that we were not successful," she said, adding that the agency does not divulge confidential information.

Even advocates of opening the records to historical research or the public acknowledge the privacy issue.

The Central Council of Jews in Germany is "very much in favor of opening up the archive," said general secretary Stephan J. Kramer.

"Yes, we are concerned that personal information be treated carefully," he added, noting that Holocaust centers such as Israel's Yad Vashem have extensive experience balancing privacy concerns with researchers needs and can be trusted to handle the data carefully.

The issue has been debated for years, but German Justice Ministry spokeswoman Cristiane Wirtz said the treaties that govern the center made change difficult. "These treaties, which make possible the work of this archive, do not foresee that opening of the archives for research purposes. That is the legal problem," she said.

"We will have to wait and see what comes out of this assembly. The fact is that there have been intensive talks ... and we will have to wait and see whether all problems have been solved to the extent that we can actually open the archives for research purposes."

Several Holocaust scholars applauded Germany's decision to consider allowing wider access.

"We are pleased," said Iris Rosenberg, spokeswoman for Yad Vashem. Israel's Holocaust museum "believes that all information related to the Holocaust should be open to scholars and the general public."

"The opening of these records is an important step forward that will give the victims of Nazi genocide their names back," added David Marwell, director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. "The German government has found the appropriate balance of personal privacy and open access."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060419/ap_on_re_eu/nazi_archives;_ylt=Aj.xtfgpsJjVVN6zjLbalrn9xg8F;_y lu=X3oDMTA3b3JuZGZhBHNlYwM3MjE-



Germany to open Holocaust archive
By Ray Furlong
BBC News, Berlin

Six million Jews perished under the Nazis

Germany is to open up a huge archive of Nazi records on concentration camp inmates and slave labourers, ending a long-running dispute.
Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries announced the move during a US visit.

The files contain detailed information about more than 17 million people who went through the concentration camp and slave labour system.

Until now, Germany had resisted international pressure to allow access, citing privacy considerations.

Personal details

The files are locked up at a former SS barracks in Bad Arolsen in central Germany.

The International Red Cross has used the files to help trace people for relatives who lost contact during the war. It still gets around 150,000 requests a year.

Over several years, there has been growing pressure to open the archive for historical research and for survivors to have direct access.

The US and UK have pushed for the files to be opened, as have Jewish groups, but Germany has always resisted, citing privacy considerations.

The files contain details ranging from the results of lice inspections to the possession of insurance policies.

Germany had feared that it would be the target of legal action if this information became public. These concerns seem now to have been put to rest.

It is not expected that the opening of the archives will have major legal implications because the deadlines set for international class action lawsuits have now passed.

The decision to open the archive can now be formally approved in May when representatives of the 11 countries which are responsible for it next meet.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4921098.stm

[Jolie Rouge]

Lost words of a German conscript
By Andrew Joynes
BBC News

Next week sees the 61st anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, the first of the Nazi death camps to be reached by British and American troops at the end of World War II.

During the last few months, Andrew Joynes has been piecing together the story of one man who survived the camp and whose story is now being told at the new memorial centre at Belsen.

Although it was a spring day there were no birds singing in the trees as I walked along the path which leads to the Bergen-Belsen memorial wall. In front of the wall is a stone pillar, and behind the pillar a series of mounds cover the sandy heathland. Each of them has a tablet inscribed "1945", with a bunch of fresh flowers placed on it.

In these mounds lie the Belsen dead, their names unknown, their stories untold.

Swastika mail

I had come to Belsen on this spring day because last autumn my wife and I decided to clear out the attic. Prisoners were allowed to send very few letters from Belsen
Tucked away under the rafters was a box of papers, which had belonged to my wife's aunt, who died some years ago. They dealt with her time in Germany at the end of the war, when she worked in a British Army office tracing displaced persons.

Among the photographs of ruined German cities there were two letters. Both envelopes were marked with a Swastika, and both had the same postmark: "Bergen-Belsen". The letters were in German, dated August 1944 and March 1945.

One of my colleagues at BBC World Service tried to translate them for me but the old-fashioned writing was difficult to decipher. We could only make out the writer's name, Anton lgel, and the fact that he was a prisoner writing from Belsen's hut No 3 to his mother in Cologne asking for news of his family.

Paper trail

I decided to take the letters back to the place where they were written

I got in touch with the German Embassy in London and, a few weeks ago, I heard from the director of the archives at Bergen-Belsen. He not only recognised the name of the letter writer, who had come out of the camp alive in 1945, but had met Anton Igel on a number of occasions before the old man's death a decade or so ago.

This was, he explained, extremely unusual. The problem for the archivists at Bergen-Belsen is the absence of precise records. Most people who enquire about the fate of individual prisoners are told: "We're sorry. We simply don't know what happened to them..."

The director went on to say that he would like to include the letters in an exhibition planned for Belsen's new documentation centre when it opens next year. So I decided to take the letters back to the place where they were written.

But I was not prepared for the story that I began to uncover.

The Igel file

In the archives there is an entire file on Anton Igel and in it, there is a memoir he wrote as an old man. Its tone is at once both tragic and comic, like the novel Candide or The Good Soldier Schweik. As a teenager, lgel was sent to a Nazi detention centre for delinquent youths.

In a sense the letters have been reclaimed by the extraordinary coincidences of their discovery in a suburban attic in the south of England

He was drafted into the German army, and then embarked on a series of desertions which took him to Gestapo cells across Europe. On his final escapade he ran away from a unit on its way to the Russian front and went to ground in the Warsaw Ghetto. He avoided being shot by feigning mental illness and was finally sent from hospital to a labour camp.

From there he was transported to Belsen in 1944.

He survived and in his old age became a campaigner for the moral principle that those who do not collaborate with a system of tyranny - those like himself, a serial deserter from the Wehrmacht - should be honoured. It is a principle which is today as relevant as ever.


Permanent record

The file had photographs of him attending memorial celebrations in his striped camp uniform, carrying a banner embroidered with his prisoner number. For most of the Belsen dead, there is no such means of telling a story His two letters from Belsen were probably left at the British Army office where my wife's aunt worked when his family were trying to trace him at the end of the war.

They were never reclaimed.... until now that is, because in a sense the letters have been reclaimed by the extraordinary coincidences of their discovery in a suburban attic in the south of England. The exhibition in which they will be displayed will deal with the fate of known individuals caught up in the inferno of Bergen-Belsen.

"Every human being should have their story told," the archive director said to me.

Silent messages

At about the time Anton Igel was writing his second letter, in March l945, one of his fellow-prisoners at Belsen, Anne Frank, was dying of typhus just a few hundred yards away from hut No 3.

Both he and she were able to tell something of their stories. Hers came in a diary, kept before she entered the camps and cut short while she was still young. His came in a memoir written in old age. For most of the Belsen dead, there is no such means of telling a story. Tens of thousands lie buried in the mass graves beside the pillar which points at the sky in commemoration and reproach.

Their message is in their silence.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4887702.stm

[Jolie Rouge]

Nazi death files set to be opened
Tuesday, May 16, 2006 Posted: 1310 GMT (2110 HKT)

LUXEMBOURG (AP) -- Armed with key concessions from Germany, an 11-nation commission convened Tuesday to finalize arrangements to open a vast archive documenting the death, enslavement or oppression of 17 million Jews, Roma and others deemed undesirable to the Nazi regime.

The move to unlock the storehouse of some 50 million files in the German town of Bad Arolsen comes under pressure from the dying generation of Holocaust survivors and victims' families who fear their histories will be lost forever unless the rules are changed for accessing the files.

Legal experts worked through the day and late into the night Monday on amending the language of two documents governing the archives -- a 1955 treaty among the 11 countries on the oversight commission, and an agreement between those countries and the International Committee of the Red Cross which administers the archive.

"There are still some problems, but I am confident we will have an agreement by this afternoon," Paul Mertz, the Luxembourg Foreign Ministry official chairing the meeting, told The Associated Press.

The countries on the International Commission are Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Israel, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Britain and the United States.

The proposed changes would give historical researchers immediate access to the cavernous rooms at Bad Arolsen containing concentration camp registrations, death certificates, transit lists and other minutiae of evil that the Nazis meticulously recorded.

They also would allow each of the 11 countries to obtain a digital copy of the Bad Arolsen archive and to make it available to researchers and victims' relatives in those countries under controlled conditions.

The commission must reach consensus on the language, and then each government must ratify the changes. Some countries will require parliamentary approval, but the U.S. State Department can endorse the amendments without Congressional involvement.

Still unresolved were issues dealing with how quickly the Bad Arolsen archive could be copied into digital files and distributed to the member countries, and how to speed up the pace of ratification, delegates said.

The International Tracing Service, the Red Cross custodian of the archive, says it has scanned 56 percent of the files since 1999, but it cannot move faster without more funding.

"We have only a restricted budget, and we get the budget only for humanitarian work," said Maria Raabe, spokeswoman of the ITS in Bad Arolsen.

The tracing service is funded by Germany, which until last month had opposed opening the archive to public access and historical research, arguing that it would violate German privacy laws.

In April, German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries announced a policy shift when she said Germany would work with the United States to open the files.

Delegates in the legal negotiations said the German delegation had shown more flexibility than in any previous round of talks.

Monday's session was the fourth intensive meeting in the past year to break the deadlock over opening the files.

The ITS, which now has 400 employees, was founded after the war to trace missing persons, including six million Jews killed in an assembly-line slaughter, and millions of displaced German civilians.

Later, survivors eligible for compensation applied to the archive for documentary evidence of their mistreatment.

But the service has lagged behind the number of requests for information, which still flow in by the tens of thousands every year. It now has a backlog of more than 400,000 inquiries.

http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/05/16/nazi.archives.ap/index.html?section=edition

[Jolie Rouge]

Files likely to spur Holocaust research
By ARTHUR MAX, Associated Press Writer

BAD AROLSEN, Germany - The 21-year-old Russian sat before a clerk of the U.S. Army Judge Advocate's office, describing the furnaces at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where he had been a prisoner until a few weeks previously.

"I saw with my own eyes how thousands of Jews were gassed daily and thrown by the hundreds into pits where Jews were burning," he said.

"I saw how little children were killed with sticks and thrown into the fire," he continued. Blood flowed in gutters, and "Jews were thrown in and died there"; more were taken off trucks and cast alive into the flames.


Today the Holocaust is known in dense and painful detail. Yet the young Russian's words leap off the faded, onionskin page with a rawness that transports the reader back to April 1945, when World War II was still raging and the world still knew little about gas chambers, genocide and the Final Solution.

The two pages of testimony, in a file randomly plucked off a shelf, are among millions of documents held by the International Tracing Service, or ITS, an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

This vast archive — 16 miles of files in six nondescript buildings in a German spa town — contains the fullest records of Nazi persecutions in existence. But because of concerns about the victims' privacy, the ITS has kept the files closed to the public for half a century, doling out information in minimal amounts to survivors or their descendants on a strict need-to-know basis.

This policy, which has generated much ill-feeling among Holocaust survivors and researchers, is about to change.

In May, after years of pressure from the United States and survivors' groups, the 11 countries overseeing the archive agreed to unseal the files for scholars as well as victims and their families. In recent weeks the ITS' interim director, Jean-Luc Blondel, has been to Washington, The Hague and to the Buchenwald memorial with a new message of cooperation with other Holocaust institutions and governments.

ITS has allowed Paul Shapiro, of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, to look at the files and has also given The Associated Press extensive access on condition no names from the files are revealed unless they have been identified in other sources.

"This is powerful stuff," said Shapiro, leafing through the file containing the Russian's statement and some 200 other testimonies that take the reader into the belly of Hitler's death machine — its camps, inmates, commandants, executioners and trusted inmates used as low-level guards and known as kapos.

"If you sat here for a day and read these files, you'd get a picture of what it was really like in the camps, how people were treated. Look — names and names of kapos, guards — the little perpetrators," he said.

Moved to this town in central Germany after the war, the files occupy a former barracks of the Waffen-SS, the Nazi Party's elite force. They are stored in long corridors of drab cabinets and neatly stenciled binders packed into floor-to-ceiling metal shelves. Their index cards alone fill three large rooms.

Mandated to trace missing persons and help families reunite, ITS has allowed few people through its doors, and has responded to requests for information on wartime victims with minimal data, even when its files could have told more.

It may take a year or more for the files to open fully. Until then, access remains tightly restricted. "We will be ready any time. We would open them today, if we had the go-ahead," said Blondel.

When the archive is finally available, researchers will have their first chance to see a unique collection of documents on concentration camps, slave labor camps and displaced persons. From toneless lists and heartrending testimony, a skilled historian may be able to stitch together a new perspective on the 20th century's darkest years from the viewpoint of its millions of victims.

"The overall story is pretty well established, but many details will be filled in," said Yehuda Bauer, professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

"There is a great deal of very interesting material on a very large number of concentration camps that we really don't know much about," he said. "It may contain surprises. We don't know. It has material that nobody's ever seen."

A visitor to the archive comes into direct contact with the bureaucracy of mass murder.

In a bound ledger with frayed binding, a copy of a list of names appears of Jews rounded up in Holland and transported to the death camps. Buried among the names is "Frank, Annelise M," her date of birth (June 12, 1929), Amsterdam address before she went into hiding (Merwerdeplein 37) and the date she was sent to a concentration camp (Sept. 3, 1944).

Frank, Annelise M. is Anne Frank.

She was on one of the last trains to Germany before the Nazi occupation of Holland crumbled. Six months later, aged 15, she died an anonymous death, one of some 35,000 casualties of typhus that ravaged the Bergen-Belsen camp. After the war, "The Diary of Anne Frank," written during her 25 months hiding in a tiny apartment with seven others, would become the most widely read book ever written on the Holocaust.

But most of the lives recorded in Bad Arolsen are known to none but their families.

They are people like Cornelis Marinus Brouwenstijn, a Dutchman who vanished into the Nazi gulag at age 22 for illegally possessing a radio. In a plain manila envelope are his photo, a wallet, some snapshots, and a naughty typewritten joke about women in the army.

After the war, his family repeatedly wrote to the Red Cross asking about him. In 1949, his parents received a terse form letter saying he died sometime between April 19 and May 3, 1945, in the area of a German labor camp. The personal effects, however, remained in Bad Arolsen, and with the family long deceased, there is no one left to apply for their return.

To critics who accuse them of being tightfisted with their information, the Red Cross and ITS counter that they have to abide by German privacy laws and protect the reputations of victims whether alive or dead. They say the files may contain unsubstantiated allegations against victims, and that opening up to researchers would distract ITS from its main task of providing documentation to survivors or victims' relatives.

One area of study that will benefit from the ITS files is the "Lebensborn" program, in which children deemed to have the "proper genes" were adopted or even kidnapped to propagate the Aryan master race of Hitler's dreams.

Another subject is the sheer scope of the Holocaust system. The files will support new research from other sources showing that the network of concentration camps, ghettos and labor camps was nearly three times more extensive than previously thought.

Postwar historians estimated about 5,000 to 7,000 detention sites. But after the Cold War ended, records began pouring out of the former communist nations of East Europe. More sites were disclosed in the last six years in claims by 1.6 million people for slave labor reparations from a $6.6 billion fund financed by the German government and some 3,000 industries.

"We have identified somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 camps and ghettos of various categories," said Geoffrey Megargee of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, who is compiling a seven-volume encyclopedia of these detention centers.

The archive has some 3.4 million files of DPs — Displaced Persons. They include names such as John Demjanjuk and Viorel Trifa, who immigrated to the United States and later became internationally known because their role in the Holocaust came into question.

Between 1933 to 1945, the Nazi persecution grew to assembly-line proportions, slaughtering 6 million Jews and an equal number of Gypsies, homosexuals, mental patients, political prisoners and other "undesirables." Tens of millions were conscripted as forced laborers.

To operate history's greatest slaughter, the Nazis created a bureaucracy that meticulously recorded the arrest, movement and death of each victim. Sometimes even the lice plucked from heads in concentration camps were counted.

But as the pace of genocide stepped up, unknown numbers were marched directly from trains to gas chambers without being registered. In the war's final months, the bookkeeping collapsed, though the extermination continued.

[Jolie Rouge]

What documents survived Nazi attempts to destroy them were collected by the Allies to help people find missing relatives. The first documents were sent in 1946 to Bad Arolsen, and the administration was handed over to the Red Cross in 1955.

Some 50 million pages — scraps of paper, transport lists, registration books, labor documents, medical and death registers — make reference to 17.5 million individuals caught up in the machinery of persecution, displacement and death.

Over the years, the International Tracing Service has answered 11 million requests to locate family members or provide certificates supporting pension claims or reparations. It says it has a 56 percent rate of success in tracing the requested name.

But the workload has been overwhelming. Two years ago it had a backlog of nearly half a million unanswered queries. Director Blondel says the number was whittled down to 155,000 this summer and will disappear by the spring of 2008. New queries have slowed to just 700 a month.

One of ITS' critics is Sabine Stein, archivist at the Buchenwald concentration camp 150 miles from Bad Arolsen. She says the archive's refusal to share its files has caused heartbreak to countless survivors and their descendants.

For instance, in 1989, Emilia Janikowska asked ITS to trace her father, Ludwig Kaminski, a coal miner from Poland who was never heard from again after his arrest in 1939. It took more than three years to send her a standard form reporting Kaminski had died in Buchenwald Dec. 1, 1939.

But there was more she could have been told.

Documents copied by the U.S. Army before they went to Bad Arolsen, which were seen by AP at Buchenwald, include mention of Kaminski. They say he was prisoner No. 8578, that he had arrived in Buchenwald six weeks earlier with 600 other Poles and had been placed in Camp 2. The known history of Buchenwald says Camp 2 was a wooden barracks and four big tents, jammed with 1,000 Poles and Vienna Jews. Dozens of inmates died from the cold that winter. The cause of Kaminski's death was pneumonia.

No one ever told his daughter any of this.

"We had no news from my father since the moment he was arrested," Janikowska said when contacted at her home in Krakow, Poland. She now wants more information for a compensation request.

Archivist Stein says: "Former inmates and their families want to see some tangible part of their history; they want to tell their stories," she said. "What I find most frustrating is that they have all these documents and they are just sitting on them."

Earlier this month, ITS went some way to make amends, delivering a full inventory of its records on Buchenwald and promising to give priority in searching for 1,000 names Stein had requested.

Compounding the delay in releasing the files is the cumbrous makeup of the governing committee. Any decision on their future requires the assent of all 11 member nations — Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland and the United States.

Last May's agreement to open the archive stipulates that it will remain off-limits until formal ratification by the 11 governments. After that, each of the 11 countries can have a digital copy of the files and decide who has access to it.

But some delegations are worried the process will take too long, at a time when aged survivors are dying every day.

"What victims of these crimes fear the most is that when they disappear — and it's happening very fast now — no one will remember the names of the families they lost," said Shapiro of the Washington museum, who was a delegate to the talks.

"It's not a diplomatic timetable, and not an archivist's timetable, but the actuarial table. If we don't succeed in having this material public while there are still survivors, then we failed," he said.

___

AP correspondents Melissa Eddy in Buchenwald, Randy Herschaft in Washington D.C., and Monika Scislowska in Warsaw contributed to this report.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061118/ap_on_re_eu/the_holocaust_papers
___

On the Net:

International Tracing Service: http://www.its-arolsen.org/

U.S. Holocaust Museum: http://www.ushmm.org/

Yad Vashem: http://www.yadvashem.org/

[Jon]

But wait.. Didn't Mel Gibson say that the Holocaust didn't exist, that it was all fabricated by the evil Jews?! ::sarcasm::

[Jolie Rouge]

Actually I think Mel said his father said that the Holacaust was exagerated by the Jews... just a few work camps for POWs and everyone blew it all out of portion.... :rolleyes: