Opening Holocaust archive may take years By Melissa Eddy, Associated Press Writer from Tri-City Herald. (Excerpted sections of a rather lengthy article.)
Despite pressure from U.S. lawmakers and frustration among Holocaust survivors, a unique Nazi-era archive remains off-limits to researchers, and officials say it could take years before the millions of documents become available for study.
Eight months have passed since the 11 countries administering the vast storehouse of log books, transport lists and death registers agreed to open the archive for research. For nearly a decade, the group had wrangled over objections that disclosure would violate the privacy of some victims.
When German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries announced in Washington last April her nation's decision to drop its resistance, she told reporters that agreement among the member states should take no more than six months. Expectations that the archive would be accessible to researchers by year's end soared.
But that agreement was just the first step in a lengthy legal process to amend a 1955 treaty governing the archive of the International Tracing Service, or ITS, an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross in the German town of Bad Arolsen.
Only Israel and the United States have so far fully endorsed the amendments adopted last May by the 11-nation International Commission....
...But scholars and groups representing the elderly survivors are exasperated at the pace, contending that urgent access to the material is needed to help refute Holocaust deniers, and that the legislative process can - and must - be expedited...
...Of the other member nations, only Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Poland have indicated they would ratify the agreement before the International Commission's annual meeting in May. Belgium, Britain, France, Greece and Italy are the remaining commission members.
Legislators from both houses of the U.S. Congress have written to other member states to speed up ratification.
Your country ... stands in the way of access to the truth and implementation of the agreement," wrote Sen. Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in letters last month to the ambassadors of those countries. "Fulfilling the intent of the agreement requires immediate action."...
...Pending ratification, the arduous process of scanning and digitally rendering the documents is about 63 percent complete, said ITS spokeswoman Maria Raabe.
...Once the agreements are ratified, each of the 11 countries will be eligible to receive a digital copy of the archive, but its use must be closely supervised. The agreement specifically rules out publication on the Internet.
The archives, set up by the Allies after World War II, have been sheltered from public scrutiny for 60 years, except for use by the Red Cross to trace missing people after the war, and later to validate victims' compensation claims. The records contain 17.5 million names.
Historians who rejoiced at last year's announcement are wondering what secrets could be revealed. [More]
This is such very disappointing news. The delay is frustrating. But even more disappointing is the news that this valuable information will not be made available via the internet. I feel sorry for the Holocaust survivors and their families. I feel sorry for all Polish genealogy researchers. Not everyone is aware that a large number of non-Jewish Poles were executed by the Nazis too. I personally have Polish Catholic family members who were executed by the Nazis and was hoping to find out more about the circumstances of their deaths. I wonder how the U.S. will make this information available to researchers.
