Prepare to see the Holocaust denial crowd go into seizures. After 60 years, the 11-nation group responsible for an archive of huge Nazi records hopes to open it to researchers within a year, although legal hurdles could delay access to some documents for years.
Bad Arolsen contains original Nazi documents the Allies seized from concentration camps as well as copies of wartime municipal records and other sources identifying victims of the Third Reich's persecutions.
So far, it has been used only to trace people missing after the war or the fate of Holocaust victims, drawing on an index of 17.5 million names in its files. Among them are Anne Frank, the Dutch teenage diarist, writer Elie Wiesel and a list of 1,000 rescued slave laborers known as Schindler's List....
The Associated Press, which was granted extensive access to the archive in the last four months, has 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 the war.
Should be illuminating. I understand privacy concerns, but it seems a real shame that this trove of data has been kept hidden for decades.
Holocaust, politics, midtopia
1 comment:
Mel Gibson is calling in sick that day...
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