A vast archive of German war records opened its doors to the public Wednesday, giving historians and [Europe’s WWII] survivors who have waited more than 60 years access to concentration camp records…
The 11 countries that oversee the archive of the International Tracing Service have finished ratifying an accord unsealing some 50 million pages kept in the German town of Bad Arolsen, ITS director Reto Meister said Wednesday.
pictured:The archive’s index which refers to 17.5 million people in its 16 linear miles of files.
“The ratification process is complete,” said Meister, whose organization is part of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
“We are there. The doors are open,” he said, speaking by telephone while visiting the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial with a delegation of U.S. congressional staff members.
Greece was the last of the 11 to formally file its ratification papers with the German Foreign Ministry. Poland, which holds the rotating chairmanship of the International Commission governing the archive, now must inform the ICRC that the ratification is complete, the final step in the process.
“It’s a relief. It took a long time, far too long,” said Paul Shapiro of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has lobbied since 2001 to pry open the ITS archive.
“I am pleased that the archive of the International Tracing Service can now be opened for research,” said Guenter Gloser, a German deputy foreign minister responsible for Europe. “I would like to invite all researchers to make use of this, and work through this dark chapter of German history.”
Until now, the archive had been used exclusively to trace missing persons, reunite families and provide documentation to victims of Nazi persecution to support compensation claims. The U.S. government also has referred to the ITS for background checks on immigrants it suspected of lying about their past.
Allied forces began collecting the documents even before the end of the war, and eventually entrusted them to the Red Cross. The archive has been governed since 1955 by a commission that normally met once a year.
The commission members are the United States, Britain, Germany, Israel, Poland, France, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
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