July 28


Opening of Archive Slower Than Expected

BAD AROLSEN, Germany --- Behind the stone walls of a rectangular
building in this picturesque town, which is famous for its baroque
architecture, sits the world's biggest archive of documents, photographs,
maps and correspondence pertaining to the Nazi Holocaust.

The entrance is emblazoned with a modest red cross. Inside these former SS
barracks and a rustic German-style structure around the corner, there are
more than 50 million written records of 18 million death camp victims,
concentration camp inmates, political prisoners and slave laborers from
all over Europe.

A legal and historical treasure trove, its contents have been largely
inaccessible to many if not most of the survivors for the past 50 years,
ever since the archive came into the possession of the International
Committee of the Red Cross. Known as the International Tracing Service and
directed until the end of last month by Charles Biedermann, a stern Swiss
bureaucrat, the archive was also off limits to researchers, journalists
and the general public. But after prolonged protests spearheaded by the
United States, and a subsequent conference in Luxembourg of the tracing
service's 11 governing nations, it was announced that many of the
restrictions would be lifted.

The announcement led many observers to assume that access was finally
being granted to bona fide scholars, and that personal requests for
documents made by wartime slave laborers who are eager for compensation
would be processed promptly. Newspaper headlines, however, often do not
reflect reality, and they certainly did not in this instance.

The center's interim director, Toni Pfanner, explained that the
participating nations in the Luxembourg conference merely agreed in
principle to amend the treaty. He pointed out that the amendment must be
ratified by each of the 11 governments responsible for the center, a
procedure that is almost complete, but taking longer than expected.

Italy and Belgium are among the countries that have expressed
reservations. They do not want information about suspected collaborators
and informers to be made available. Germany, which covers the tracing
service's budget, has strict privacy laws and therefore opposes the
release of documents that could incriminate its citizens.

Israel, which is one of the governing countries, shares Germany's anxiety
over evidence that could implicate Jewish survivors known as "Kapos," who
served as policemen in concentration camps. Some of them may be suspected
of having killed other Jews by order of their Nazi captors. In the past,
Israel has conducted trials of these self-tormented and embittered
individuals - only to incur its public's disgust.

With such issues still unsettled, things are moving slower than planned.

"There was supposed to be a signing ceremony, July 26," Pfanner said. "But
it has been delayed."

Pfanner also said that the digitalization process demanded by America and
by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington would take a
year or longer. Computer experts believe that 1,000 employees working full
time would be necessary to get the job done in that time frame but only
400 people work at the Bad Arolsen facility.

Despite these complications, most of the records of Jewish victims already
can be found at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Authority in Jerusalem.
The head of Yad Vashem's enormous archive, Yaacov Lazowick, attributed
this to the presence of an Israeli foreign ministry representative in Bad
Arolsen from the mid 1950s until 1965.

As a result, 20 million documents pertaining to Jews, relevant historical
records, and the central index were microfilmed and sent to Israel.

"Every incoming document was indexed on the basis of the name it mentions,
the dates and treatment (expulsion, etc.)," he said. "That tells me
everything."

According to Lazowick, the material transferred deals with "98%" of the
Jews about whom the tracing center has records. There was no explanation
about the material withheld. "As far as Yad Vashem is concerned, the
Jewish aspect was taken care of in 1958," Lazowick said. "Since that date,
the proportion of its material that deals with Jews [compared with the
overall documentary coverage of other nationalities] is small."

The people who were arguably most hurt by the restrictive policies have
been non-Jews who were forced to work as slave laborers during World War
II. Because of red tape, insufficient staff, and the flood of appeals for
biographical data that began with the downfall of the Soviet Union and the
transformation of its Eastern European satellites into independent states,
hundreds of thousands of Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians and other European
nationals have little or no chance of receiving monetary compensation for
the work they did as slave laborers in Nazi Germany during World War II.

To qualify for reparations, the slave laborers are required to provide
ample proof of the hardships they endured as industrial workers, miners
and servants for salaries as low as $8 per month.

The diabolical irony of the Nazi-forced labor regime is epitomized in an
"Arbeitsbuch," or work booklet for foreigners, thousands of which have
been collected by the tracing service. One of them contains the
registration number of Petro Schwarz, along with his photograph and date
of birth: January 21, 1925. The impeccable text is in the German
language's Old Gothic script. It includes Schwarz's home address in
Poland, gives the location of his employment as Silesia (then part of
Germany, but annexed by Poland after the war) and lists his job as a coal
miner.

There are rows upon rows of social security payment stamps on the inside
pages, each one emblazoned with the Nazi swastika and all of them pasted
with perfect precision.

It looks as if Schwarz's employers wanted the economic and social
injustice from which they benefited to look quite orderly and normal.

American and Allied soldiers were the main collectors of this vast store
of documentation, in the war's final months and in its immediate
aftermath. They were ordered to collect all the files stashed away by the
Nazi SS in their death and concentration camp archives.

According to the center's dedicated archivist Manfred Kesting, a German
national who has been working there since 1985, the Allied authorities in
the former American, British and French zones of occupied Germany also
ordered "all Germans to report all foreigners" who were in their country
during the war. Later, the Soviet Union transferred copies of its Nazi
documents, by which time the center had been placed under the exclusive
direction of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

But until the center's 50 million documents are digitized, a snail's-pace
process underway since 1998, it will remain technically impossible to make
them available to the survivors who need them. According to Pfanner, who
arrived at this rustic-looking facility about a month ago, there is a
backlog of 320,000 requests.

At least two of the center's restrictions are expected to be maintained:
The data will not be made available on the Internet, and the general
public will not be admitted to the facilities.

"The main consideration is the economic one; the Germans do not want the
information available to all comers," said Moshe Zimmerman, a specialist
in modern German history. "They do not want unauthorized persons to have
access to the material."

(source: The Forward)