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AFTER decades of resistance, Germany has agreed to allow access to a vast trove of information on the more than 17 million people who were executed, forced to labour for the Nazi war machine or otherwise brutalised during the Holocaust.
The records kept in the town of Bad Arolsen, which make up one of the largest Holocaust archives in the world, are more than 24 kilometres long and hold up to 50 million documents, some seized by the Allies as they liberated concentration camps.
The Justice Minister, Brigitte Zypries, said Germany would seek revision of an international arrangement that governs the archives, ending a nasty diplomatic dispute between the United States and Germany.
More important, officials at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington said, it would open the documents to historians and researchers, whose access has been blocked because of Germany's strict privacy laws.
"Sixty years after the end of the war, it's time," Arthur Berger, the museum's senior adviser on external affairs, said after Ms Zypries pledged that Germany would work with the US to make the documents available.
Paul Shapiro, the director of advanced Holocaust studies at the museum, said the documents would offer insights into the day-to-day evils of the Nazi era, "the routine process of deportation, concentration camps, slave labour, killing".
And perhaps, Mr Shapiro said, the paperwork would offer clues to "a few new perpetrators" who, if no longer subject to earthly justice, can at least stand before the bar of history.
Mr Shapiro said museum officials hoped to make the documents "truly accessible", available for computer viewing at Holocaust research centres around the world.
Until now, Holocaust survivors and their relatives have been able to seek information from the Bad Arolsen archives, but they have sometimes waited years, said Sara Bloomfield, director of the Holocaust museum in Washington.
The files are controlled by the International Tracing Service, which operates as an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The service, which since the end of World War II has used the files to help people learn about relatives who were victims of German atrocities, has been swamped.
The tracing service is run by a commission representing the US, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, Israel, Poland and Luxembourg.
In Washington on Tuesday, Ms Zypries said Germany would move next month in Luxembourg to change the treaty to open the archives. She said her government would try to persuade Italy, which has also resisted opening the documents, to go along.
In its resistance to making the archives widely accessible, the German Government has cited the personal nature of much of the information in the files.
The papers may reveal, for instance, who was treated for lice at which camp, what medical experiments were conducted on particular prisoners, and which inmates were tempted to collaborate with their captors.
But Ms Bloomfield said such considerations were invalid. "The history is the history," she said, adding that Holocaust documents released earlier also contained personal information.
AFTER decades of resistance, Germany has agreed to allow access to a vast trove of information on the more than 17 million people who were executed, forced to labour for the Nazi war machine or otherwise brutalised during the Holocaust.
The records kept in the town of Bad Arolsen, which make up one of the largest Holocaust archives in the world, are more than 24 kilometres long and hold up to 50 million documents, some seized by the Allies as they liberated concentration camps.
The Justice Minister, Brigitte Zypries, said Germany would seek revision of an international arrangement that governs the archives, ending a nasty diplomatic dispute between the United States and Germany.
More important, officials at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington said, it would open the documents to historians and researchers, whose access has been blocked because of Germany's strict privacy laws.
"Sixty years after the end of the war, it's time," Arthur Berger, the museum's senior adviser on external affairs, said after Ms Zypries pledged that Germany would work with the US to make the documents available.
Paul Shapiro, the director of advanced Holocaust studies at the museum, said the documents would offer insights into the day-to-day evils of the Nazi era, "the routine process of deportation, concentration camps, slave labour, killing".
And perhaps, Mr Shapiro said, the paperwork would offer clues to "a few new perpetrators" who, if no longer subject to earthly justice, can at least stand before the bar of history.
Mr Shapiro said museum officials hoped to make the documents "truly accessible", available for computer viewing at Holocaust research centres around the world.
Until now, Holocaust survivors and their relatives have been able to seek information from the Bad Arolsen archives, but they have sometimes waited years, said Sara Bloomfield, director of the Holocaust museum in Washington.
The files are controlled by the International Tracing Service, which operates as an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The service, which since the end of World War II has used the files to help people learn about relatives who were victims of German atrocities, has been swamped.
The tracing service is run by a commission representing the US, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, Israel, Poland and Luxembourg.
In Washington on Tuesday, Ms Zypries said Germany would move next month in Luxembourg to change the treaty to open the archives. She said her government would try to persuade Italy, which has also resisted opening the documents, to go along.
In its resistance to making the archives widely accessible, the German Government has cited the personal nature of much of the information in the files.
The papers may reveal, for instance, who was treated for lice at which camp, what medical experiments were conducted on particular prisoners, and which inmates were tempted to collaborate with their captors.
But Ms Bloomfield said such considerations were invalid. "The history is the history," she said, adding that Holocaust documents released earlier also contained personal information.
