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Holocaust survivors seek Nazi files
2007-03-29
Witnesses told a congressional panel of their frustration with the long, still-unfinished process of opening a secret Nazi archive with millions of files on concentration camps and their victims. Leo Rechter, an Austrian Jew who survived the Holocaust as a boy by hiding in basements and attics after his family fled to Belgium and his father was deported to Auschwitz, testified Wednesday of his incredulity that the information had been kept from survivors for more than sixty years. "Of all the public archives in the world, what possible justification can there be to prevent us from learning the truth about what happened to our families during the Holocaust?" he asked. "This information really belongs to us; it's about our lives." Rechter, president of the U.S.-based National Association of Jewish Child Holocaust Survivors, was speaking at a hearing in the House of Representatives designed to pressure the members of the 11-country body that oversees the files in Bad Arolsen, Germany, take the final necessary steps to make them available for research. The Associated Press, which has been granted rare access to the archive in recent months on condition that victims are not fully identified, has drawn attention to the importance of the documents. AP researchers have seen a vast array of letters by Nazi commanders, Gestapo orders and vivid testimony from victims and observers of the brutality of camp life and the "death marches" when camps were ordered cleared of prisoners at the end of World War II. Paul Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, said in testimony prepared for the panel Wednesday that he had visited the vast Bad Arolsen archive last winter with two AP journalists. He said their subsequent reports had illuminated wide-ranging historical detail previously unknown about the Holocaust and provided a glimpse of what the files might reveal. For instance, Shapiro said that documents found by the AP showing infrastructure in concentration camps and ghettos far greater in size than previously known will contribute to an encyclopedia being written by his museum on the grim facilities. He said the files also revealed near complete documentation on the Buchenwald camp near Weimar, Germany. This month, the nations overseeing the archive set procedures to open the records by the end of the year. But before the material can be accessed, all member countries must ratify an agreement adopted last year to end the 60-year ban on using the files for research. The State Department said Wednesday that Britain recently joined the United States, Israel, Poland and the Netherlands in completing ratification. Germany and Luxembourg have said they would ratify before the commission meets again in May. The positions of France, Belgium, Italy and Greece were unclear. J. Christian Kennedy, the State Department's special envoy for Holocaust issues, credited international media attention and a coordinated effort by the U.S. government, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, survivors and members of Congress for the progress so far. He said that if the full body had not yet ratified the necessary changes for release by the end of the year, the United States has made clear to the other members that some other process for the opening will have to be considered. Other witnesses testifying Wednesday said it was unacceptable that diplomatic negotiations for final ratification could delay the process further. "The timetable for this project is not a diplomatic timetable," Shapiro said. "Every month of additional delay means more survivors gone -- an irreversible benchmark of the consequence of delay." While much has been written about the Holocaust, scholars say the Bad Arolsen files will fill in historical gaps and provide a unique perspective gained from seeing original Nazi letters, the minutiae of the concentration camps' structures, slave labor records and uncounted testimonies of victims and ordinary Germans who witnessed the brutality of the Gestapo. In the last 60 years, the Red Cross' Tracing Service has responded to 11 million requests from survivors and their families, but the overwhelming number of inquiries led to delays lasting years and resulted in only the sketchiest of replies. Once the files are available in Washington, Jerusalem and other locations, survivors will be able to search for information under the normal rules of each archive.
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