After 50 years, Holocaust archive going public

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After 50 years, Holocaust archive going public

Unsealing of millions of documents likely to spur new questions, research

Associated Press

Updated: 9:01 a.m. CT Nov 19, 2006

The Associated Press was recently given extensive access to the largest archive of Nazi prison camp records, which has been closed for 50 years, on condition that names of the victims remain protected. This is the first in a series of reports.

BAD AROLSEN, Germany - The 21-year-old Russian sat before a clerk of the U.S. Army Judge Advocate’s office, describing the furnaces at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where he had been a prisoner until a few weeks previously.

“I saw with my own eyes how thousands of Jews were gassed daily and thrown by the hundreds into pits where Jews were burning,” he said.

“I saw how little children were killed with sticks and thrown into the fire,” he continued. Blood flowed in gutters, and “Jews were thrown in and died there”; more were taken off trucks and cast alive into the flames.

Today the Holocaust is known in dense and painful detail. Yet the young Russian’s words leap off the faded, onionskin page with a rawness that transports the reader back to April 1945, when World War II was still raging and the world still knew little about gas chambers, genocide and the Final Solution.

The two pages of testimony, in a file randomly plucked off a shelf, are among millions of documents held by the International Tracing Service, or ITS, an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15791203/