Copies of largest closed archive of Nazi records to be given to U.S., Israeli museums

Holocaust survivors move closer this week to being able to find a paper trail of their own persecution when the keepers of a Nazi archive deliver copies of Gestapo papers and concentration camp records to museums in Washington and Jerusalem.

For a survivor, it could be discovering one's name on a list of deportees crammed into a cattle car; a record of a fiendish medical experiment from which physical or mental scars remain; an innocuous-looking "behavior report" condemning the inmate to further tortures; or an order from the Gestapo, the secret police, to liquidate a camp, signaling the start of a "death march" in the closing days of World War II.

But it will be months before the archive can be used by survivors or victims' relatives to search family histories. Even after it opens to the public, navigating the vast files for specific names will be nearly impossible without a trained guide.

This week, the director of the International Tracing Service, custodian of the unique collection that has been locked away for a half century in Germany, is transferring six computer hard drives bearing electronic images of 20 million pages to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Copies will go to the Yad Vashem Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem.

It is the first tranche of digital copies from one of the world's largest Nazi archives, with the final documents scheduled to be copied and delivered by early 2009.

"For research into the Holocaust, this is the main substance. It is the heart of the archive," said Reto Meister, the former Swiss diplomat who heads ITS, a branch of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Meister will hand over the hard drives to museum director Sara J. Bloomfield in Washington. He also will brief U.S. Congressional staff on progress in opening the files _ a nod to American lawmakers who pressed the ITS' 11-nation oversight commission to open the doors.

Though the museums' researchers can begin working with the material immediately, the public must wait for legal formalities to conclude _ which could take several more months.

Unlocking the archive required all 11 countries to amend their international treaty. France, Italy and Greece have yet to complete the process. The others on the commission are the United States, Israel, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Luxembourg and Germany.

The index of 17.5 million names on file with ITS is the key to finding documents and will arrive later this year, though it is not in computer-readable format and cannot be used like Google. "The public will be able to come to the museum and see the material in the manner in which we received it," said Paul Shapiro, director of the museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.

Also, there is no guarantee that a name appears in the archive. It may have been among the many destroyed by the Nazis as their defeat approached. Those sent to directly to death camps may never have been listed anywhere.

But historians believe the files will add texture to the narrative of misery in the camps, where millions of people were worked to death or were simply exterminated with industrial efficiency. Six million Jews died in the Holocaust, one of every three Jews on earth. Millions of homosexuals, gypsies, political opponents and others also were killed.

The Associated Press has been given repeated access to the archive in Bad Arolsen in recent months. Random searches through its 26 linear kilometers (16 miles) of files revealed a wealth of mundane yet telling detail on life and death in the camps.

One small example: an exchange of letters between the SS commander of Lichtenberg and the local Catholic priest seeking permission to celebrate mass for the inmates. The letters over several months of 1936 show the number of Catholics dwindling until the priest is told there is "no point" to return.

"There can be a lot there that no one expects," said Juergen Matthaeus, the director of applied research at the museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. "This is the biggest trove of material on the camps. If it's not there, then probably it's not to be found."

Much is known about the web of concentration camps, death factories and forced labor facilities, drawn from the memories of survivors, the Nuremberg war crimes trials, and from documents found among town hall records and other repositories in German-held territories.

But new research keeps turning up surprises.

Compilers of a seven-volume encyclopedia of incarceration sites estimated the number at 6,000 to 8,000 when they began work at the Washington museum seven years ago. By now they have identified more than 20,000 _ and more may be found in the ITS files.

Matthaeus, who is heading the encyclopedia project, says his team will look for more detail on who ran the camps, who guarded them, whether there was any resistance, what were the relations with neighboring communities.

The Tracing Service was created from the papers swept up by the Allies after the war and stored in a disused SS barracks in Bad Arolsen, and the Red Cross took over responsibility in 1955. Its task was to find missing people, reunite families or discover how victims died. Later it was used to support restitution claims.

The archivists created an index of 17.5 million victims mentioned somewhere in their vast storehouse, about one-fourth of them Jews. But millions of victims were obliterated from the written record when the Gestapo destroyed huge stores of documents as the regime was collapsing.

Over the decades, the ITS received 11 million inquiries, and found answers for 56 percent. But it was accused of gross inefficiency, and the backlog of inquiries built up to more than 400,000 at one point, with a waiting period of three years.

Today, up to 8,000 inquiries still come in a year, but the response time has been whittled down to a weeks or a few months. Now, the survivors are dying, and four of every five inquiries now comes from their children or grandchildren, said Meister, speaking from Bad Arolsen.

"It is a new generation that would like to know what happened to their families," said Meister.

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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/