May 19



GERMANY//GLOBAL:

German archive reveals a panorama of misery


Looking back at the first weeks after World War II, a French lieutenant
named Henri Francois-Poncet despaired at ever fulfilling his mission to
establish the fate of French inmates of the Bergen-Belsen concentration
camp.

For the living skeletons who survived the Nazi terror, the Displaced
Persons camp set up two miles (three kilometers) away offered little
relief from misery.

People still died at the rate of 1,000 to 1,500 a day. Corpses were
stacked in front of barracks, to be carted away by captured SS guards.
"Bodies frequently remained for several days in the huts, the other
inmates being too weak to carry them out," Francois-Poncet wrote in a
report for the Allied Military Government.

"As most of the survivors could not even give their own names, it was
useless trying to obtain information as to the identity of the dead," he
wrote. He reported a meager 25 percent success rate.

When the Third Reich surrendered in May 1945, 8 million people were left
uprooted around Europe. Millions drifted through the 2,500 hastily
arranged DP camps before they were repatriated.

A bleak picture springs with stark immediacy from typewritten reports by
the Allied officers, found in the massive archive of the International
Tracing Service in the central German town of Bad Arolsen. The Associated
Press has been given extensive access to the archive on condition that
identities of victims and refugees are protected.

Far from scenes of joyful liberation that should have greeted the end of
Nazi oppression, the files reveal desperation, loss and confusion, and
overwhelmed and often insensitive military authorities.

Many had nowhere to go, their families among the 6 million Jews consumed
in the Holocaust, their homes destroyed or handed out to new occupants.
Those who wanted to get to Palestine were shut out by a British ban on
Jewish immigration to the Israeli state-in-waiting.

"Owing to ill treatment by the Germans, most DPs have a distrust and fear
of the Allied authorities," said a September 1945 report signed by British
Lt. Col. C.C. Allan. "Many DPs have sunk into complete apathy regarding
their future."

Liberated concentration camps were transformed into DP camps. Food was
still scarce -- often just coffee and wet black bread -- and medical care
was insufficient, said a report written for President Harry Truman.

Inmates were kept under armed guard to maintain order. They still wore
their old striped, pajama-like concentration-camp-issue uniforms and slept
in the same drafty barracks through a bitter winter.

Compounding their misery, they could watch through barbed wire fences and
see German villagers living normal lives. In some places, those villagers
were forced to tour the camps and help with the burials or at least face
up to what their Fuehrer had wrought. But it was scant comfort to the
victims.

"As things stand now, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis
treated them, except that we do not exterminate them," wrote presidential
envoy Earl G. Harrison in his famously quoted report to Truman after
visiting that summer.

Known for its unparalleled collection of original concentration camp
papers, the ITS, a branch of the International Committee of the Red Cross,
also safeguards the world's largest documentation on postwar DP camps. It
has nearly 3.4 million names on its card index of those who sought
designation as refugees eligible for aid.

Until now, the documents have been used only to trace missing people and
verify restitution claims. But now the full breadth of the archive,
filling 16 miles (25 kilometers) of shelf space, is to be opened to
historians for the first time. At a meeting last week in Amsterdam,
Netherlands, the archive's 11-nation supervisory commission agreed to
begin transferring electronic copies this autumn to the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington and to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Within weeks after the war, U.N. agencies and volunteer charities took
over the DP camps, processing applications for relief and emigration. By
1947, a quarter million Jews -- a piteous remnant of European Jewry --
shared space with displaced Eastern Europeans fearful of return to what
was now the Soviet bloc.

Also among the DPs were ex-Nazis.

Adam Friedrich's 1949 application to the International Refugee
Organization to join relatives in St. Louis, acknowledges that for three
years he belonged to the Waffen SS, the combat arm of Hitler's dreaded
paramilitary organization. He also noted he had been imprisoned for 20
months after the war.

An IRO official scribbled on his form, "The applicant was forced to report
to the SS in Jan. '42. Served in the infantry and took part in fighting."

Friedrich was rejected.

But U.S. authorities did not have that information four years later when
he applied again through the U.S. Refugee Relief Act. Then, Friedrich
reported he had been in the German army but said nothing about his SS
service.

Decades after he obtained citizenship, the U.S. Justice Department
uncovered Friedrich's past. He was stripped of his citizenship in 2004,
lost a Supreme Court appeal, and was due to be deported when he died last
July.

At Bad Arolsen, questionnaires and affidavits are stuffed into 400,000
envelopes which, including families, refer to 850,000 displaced people,
and fill binders spreading over several rooms of floor-to-ceiling shelves.

The last DP camps were closed in 1953, so "When you feel the paper tug as
you try to pull it out, that means no one has opened it for 40 or 50
years," said Rudolf Michalke, head of the archive's postwar section.

Accounts of camp survivors and their tormentors

Some files contain detailed histories of survivors and the tortures they
endured. Refugees relate their futile struggle to resettle after the war,
and their hopes of rebuilding their lives far from Europe.

An Austrian pastry chef recounts the hostility he found when he returned
to Vienna. "Given the large and increasingly negative climate against
Jews, I have not been able to get a job and am forced to emigrate," he
testified, seeking passage to Australia.

Others describe their tormentors, hoping they will be prosecuted.

A Polish Jew writes about "Workmaster Batenszlajer," one of about a dozen
guards he named as particularly cruel.

"He made selections. Those who lost their strength because they were
exhausted and looked bad were picked out and shot down," he wrote.
Batenszlajer would pick four girls at a time and hold them for several
days. "He raped them and afterward he took them into a wood and shot them
down."

In a world where racism was rampant, finding a new home was not easy, as
one Yugoslav-born man with Asian features learned. "Being a Kalmyk of
Mongolian race, [he] is ineligible for most Anglo-Saxon countries,"
authorities scrawled on his form.

"The doors are closed to unmarried mothers," said a note from strongly
Catholic Ireland.

Lining up employment in a new country was critical for obtaining a visa.
Yugoslav-born Nikolai Davidovic, a mathematics professor who spoke seven
languages and authored two textbooks, left for America in 1950 with his
wife Larissa -- but only after she had been promised a job as a maid.

Friedrich was not the only war criminal to slip through the screening
process. Dieter Pohl, of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich,
estimates that up to 250,000 Germans and Austrians had participated in the
Holocaust, but only 5 to 10 percent were ever punished -- most of them in
the Soviet zone. Altogether, an estimated 500,000 to 1 million people
committed crimes against humanity, he said.

But no one knew who the perpetrators were. "More than 90 percent of files
on Nazi war crimes were destroyed," Pohl said in a telephone interview.

The U.S. zeal in pursuing former Nazis came late. In the war's aftermath,
the Americans were more concerned about the looming threat from Stalin's
Soviet Union.

In 1979, the Justice Department created the Office of Special
Investigations to pursue ex-Nazis who committed visa fraud by lying about
their past. Since then, it has won 104 prosecutions and denied entry at
the U.S. border to 175 people from its watch list of 70,000 suspected
persecutors.

"We are still very busy with World War II cases," said OSI director Eli
Rosenbaum. "We have always routinely checked Arolsen's DP holdings when
we've been investigating someone," he told the AP.

But the ITS files are far from complete, and unlike Friedrich, most former
SS members concealed their crimes with lies or half-truths.

John Demjanjuk, a Ukranian-born camp guard who became an auto worker in
Cleveland, reported in his refugee papers, seen in Bad Arolsen, that he
had been a "worker" in Sobibor. Although Sobibor later became infamous as
a death camp in occupied Poland, few people had heard of it after the war
because it had been dismantled in 1943. Demjanjuk was awarded DP status.

In 1977, the U.S. government moved to revoke his citizenship,
misidentifying him as "Ivan the Terrible," a notorious guard at Treblinka
extermination camp. He was extradited to Israel, tried and sentenced to
death in 1988. The sentence was overturned on appeal and Demjanjuk
returned to the U.S., where his citizenship was restored -- only to be
taken from him again for concealing his work for the Nazis. He is now
fighting deportation.

The file on Valerian Trifa, who became the U.S. archbishop of the Romanian
Orthodox church and who once gave the opening prayer for the U.S. Senate,
sheds light on the deceptions he deployed to win a ticket to the U.S.

Trifa, a leader of Romania's fascist Iron Guard, told refugee officials he
had been interned in Dachau and Buchenwald, but he said nothing about the
privileges or protection he received from the Germans, according to Paul
Shapiro, who investigated the Trifa case in the late 1970s for the Justice
Department. Shapiro is now director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust
Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Shapiro saw Trifa's file at ITS for the first time when he visited Bad
Arolsen last year with an AP reporter. "I knew the facts that are in here,
except for the manner in which he was treated in terms of his Displaced
Persons status," he said, flipping through aging pages in the manila
folder. "It's quite shocking when you actually see it."

Trifa relinquished his citizenship in 1980 after it was discovered he gave
a speech in 1941 in Bucharest that unleashed a pogrom in which more than
150 Romanian Jews were killed. He left the United States in 1984 for
Portugal, where he died three years later.

"To see someone receiving citizenship based on lies is not a great thing,"
Shapiro said. "If this stuff had been available then [in the 1970s], his
case would have been resolved earlier. He would have lived fewer years in
the United States."

(source: Associated Press)





POLAND:

Holocaust denier expelled from Warsaw book fair


British historian David Irving, a convicted holocaust denier, was escorted
out of an international book fair in Warsaw where he was planning to
display his books, Polish organisers said yesterday.

Irving, who was arrested in Austria after his arrival on a visit in
November 2005, spent more than a year in an Austrian jail for denying the
Nazis organised mass murder of six million Jews during World War Two.

"We asked him to leave," said Grzegorz Guzowski, the book fair organiser.
"Our employees helped him pack up his things, and our car drove him to the
address he specified."

He said Irving's publishers did not send materials detailing his work to
the fair until a few hours before the deadline, giving organisers too
little time to prevent the self-taught historian from setting up a table
at the exhibition.

Unlike many European countries, Polish law does not expressly forbid
Holocaust denial, Warsaw University law professor Piotr Kruszynski told
Reuters.

"Polish laws prohibiting the promotion of fascism and defamation of people
on racial and religious grounds could conceivably be extended to include
Irving's writings," he added.

Irving plans to remain in the country for a few more days to visit
Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps in Poland.

"It's ironic that it's come to a situation like this in Poland, which
fought against restrictions on speech for such a long time," Irving was
quoted by daily Zycie Warszawy as saying.

(source: Reuters)





ITALY:


Italian university bars Holocaust denier


An Italian university closed one of its campuses for the day Friday
to prevent a planned lecture by a retired French professor who denies gas
chambers were used in Nazi concentration camps.

Faurisson had been invited to lecture at the University of Teramo, in
central Italy, by Claudio Moffa, a professor of Asian and African history
and director of a masters program in Middle East studies.

"(There is) a climate of tension which could put in danger the safety of
the students," the university said.

Moffa was pushed by a protester, said police official Mimmo De Carolis.
When reached by telephone, Moffa said the lecture had been canceled
because of the attack, but gave no other details.

The university administration had issued an official warning to Moffa to
cancel the invitation, arguing that Faurissons qualifications were
"absolutely inadequate and dont deserve academic legitimization."

"I want to specify that I am not a denier, but I think it is fair to allow
a free debate and different interpretations of historical events," Moffa
wrote on his Web site.

"To welcome Faurisson is an embarrassment to Italian academia, offends the
families of Italian martyrs who fell in fighting the scourge of fascism
... and encourages a perverse propaganda to incite a new generation to
anti-Semitism and racist doctrine," the center said.

Last year, Faurisson took part in a conference in Iran, which gathered
some of the most well-known U.S. and European Holocaust deniers to debate
whether the World War II genocide of Jews took place.

(source: Associated Press)


***************

Italian University Partly Closes to Thwart Speech by Holocaust Denier

Italy's University of Teramo shut down part of its campus on Friday to
block a lecture by a Holocaust denier who had been invited to speak by a
professor, the Associated Press reported. The Holocaust denier, Robert
Faurisson, is a former French professor who has been convicted repeatedly
of violating laws that prohibit the denial of crimes against humanity.
Such laws are on the books in several European countries.

He had been invited by Claudio Moffa, a professor of Asian and African
history and director of a masters program in Middle East studies. Mr.
Moffa cited academic freedom in defending the invitation. The university
first ordered him to withdraw the invitation because Mr. Faurisson's
credentials were academically illegitimate. Later, as protests mounted
over the planned speech, the university cited security fears in closing
the campus.

(source: Chronicle of Higher Education)


***************

University Bars Holocaust Denier

Robert Faurisson, a French academic and outspoken Holocaust denier, was
prevented from holding a talk at Teramo University in central Italy when
the rector, Mauro Mattioli, decided to shut down the university for the
day because of rising tensions over Mr. Faurissons presence. Mr. Faurisson
had been invited to lecture at the university by a professor who runs a
masters program in Middle East studies. The decision to close the campus
was taken because of security considerations, Mr. Mattioli said in a
statement. In Poland, meanwhile, another well-known Holocaust denier, the
British historian and author David Irving, was ordered to leave the Warsaw
International Book Fair after he turned up publicize his work, organizers
of the fair said.

(source: Agence France Presse)





ESTONIA:

Estonia opens first new synagogue


Rabbi Kot says Estonian Jews can now live their religion fully

Estonia's first synagogue since the Holocaust has opened in the capital,
Tallinn, to serve the Baltic state's current community of about 2,500
Jews.

The Nazis had described Estonia as being "free of Jews" by the time they
held the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 to plot the Final Solution.

Few who escaped the Nazis returned after the war and those who did faced
religious curbs under Soviet rule.

Estonia's top rabbi said his community could once again "feel like Jews".

"For a long time... there was no rabbi, no kosher food... no possibility
to learn about Judaism," Chief Rabbi Shmuel Kot told The Associated Press.

The new, privately funded synagogue in central Tallinn, described by news
agencies as an ultramodern, airy structure, can seat 180 people in its
main worship area.

Estonia's Holocaust

Previous synagogues in Tallinn and the second city, Tartu, were destroyed
during the war which saw a Jewish community of about 4,500 displaced or
destroyed.

A memorial marks the site of a notorious work camp at Klooga

About 3,500 were able to escape to the USSR before the Germans arrived but
of the 1,000 who remained, all but seven were murdered by Nazis or
Estonian collaborators, Dr Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in
Jerusalem told the BBC News website.

Some of those who escaped later helped defeat the Nazis as soldiers in the
Soviet Army and the controversial relocation of a Soviet war memorial from
a Tallinn square earlier this year had been a "sensitive issue" for the
community, Rabbi Kot told Reuters.

While welcoming the synagogue's opening, Dr Zuroff told the BBC News
website that Estonia was not doing enough to track down Estonian Holocaust
collaborators who escaped abroad after the war - a suggestion a police
spokesman has denied.

Under Nazi rule, Dr Zuroff says, Estonian security police units played a
part in the Holocaust in Belarus and Poland, as well as helping murder
Jews in their own country.

An unknown number of Jews from other parts of Europe were also worked to
death in 20 labour camps set up by the Nazis on Estonian soil and guarded,
in part, by Estonian police.

New investigations

Since gaining independence from the USSR in 1991, Estonia has convicted 11
people of Soviet-era crimes, particularly the mass deportation of 1949,
but has not prosecuted any suspected Nazi-era war criminals.

The Soviet KGB extensively investigated Estonian Nazi war criminals itself
and convicted at least 18 in the 1960s, Superintendent Martin Arpo of the
Estonian security police board told the BBC News website.

In 2001, the police investigated an Estonian expatriate who was a police
official under the Nazis, and was identified as a Holocaust suspect by the
Wiesenthal Centre. The case, apparently rejected by the KGB itself in the
1960s for lack of evidence, was dropped by the Estonians for the same
reason.

Two other Nazi-era cases are still under investigation, Supt Arpo added,
saying he could not give names for legal reasons.

Dr Zuroff says that questions like Holocaust restitution, education and
commemoration in the new Estonia can be decided in the future.

However, the prosecution of surviving Nazi war criminals, he believes, has
to be decided now "because once the criminals die, that's the end of the
issue".

(source: BBC News)




USA//OHIO:

Holocaust memorial garden to be planted at Stone Gardens


Next month, Stone Gardens residents will have their own Holocaust memorial
right outside their front door.

Six weeping cherry trees will be planted at the assisted living residence
to symbolize the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust.

"Our mitzvah corps was looking for our next significant project," says
Stone Gardens resident Albert Blitstein, who initiated the project. "I
thought a living memorial to recognize the Holocaust was best. That is
how I came up with the weeping cherry trees."

The mitzvah corps took the proposal to Stone Gardens administrator Ross
Wilkoff, who found it in keeping with the philosophy of the Menorah Park
campus.

"We want the residents at Myers, Menorah Park, Stone Gardens and Wiggins
to be able to express their feelings about the Holocaust and to
memorialize these sentiments in a way that is meaningful to them," says
Wilkoff. The Stone Gardens mitzvah corps is comprised of vital people
taking charge of their lives and doing great things to help others. "It is
good that our residents will have this garden on their grounds so they
can visit it and take pride in its existence."

Once a budget was set, the mitzvah corps established a fundraising plan.
Blitstein received a sizeable contribution from his daughter and
son-in-law, Shelly and Tom Weisz of Florida, and the rest of the money
came from Stone Gardens residents.

"Whether they are donating $1 or $100, it is important for our residents
to take ownership of this memorial," says Wilkoff. To date, the Holocaust
project has raised more than $1,500; extra funds will be used for its
on-going professional maintenance.

A published author and aerial photographer, Blitstein has written the
plaque that will be an integral part of the garden.

"This living memorial is dedicated to the six million Jews who died in the
Holocaust. It is to verify we will never forget them. The six living trees
planted in their memory are called weeping cherry trees. Although six
decades of time have passed since the Holocaust, we still weep for them."

Once the memorial garden is completed, Blitstein hopes many Holocaust
survivors and community members will attend the opening ceremony.

"This is our way of saying, 'Never forget,'" he says.

(source: Cleveland Jewish News)




**************


USA//CALIFORNIA:

A UCLA scholar won a $1.5 million prize for a three-year project on the
impact of the Holocaust on American literature. The Mellon Foundation
Award presented to English and literature professor Eric Sundquist is
America's largest in the humanities.

Sundquist, 54, argued in his study that English-language books are largely
responsible for Americanizing and universalizing the Holocaust in the
worlds consciousness.

He is described by colleagues at Columbia and Harvard universities as "the
most productive American literature scholar of his generation." His book
"Strangers in The Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America" won the
Weinberg Judaic Studies Institute Award last month from the University of
Scranton in Pennsylvania.

(source: JTA)


****************


USA//WASH. DC:

Holocaust survivors steaming
Anger flares over records from tracing service


Holocaust survivors are venting their anger at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum over its unwillingness to allow immediate, unrestricted electronic
access to the long-secret records of the International Tracing Service at
Bad Arolsen, Germany.

During its annual meeting, held Monday and Tuesday in Amsterdam, the
international commission that controls the ITS approved a plan by which
millions of digitized images relating to the Holocaust will be transferred
to the museum in D.C. for processing, perhaps as soon as the end of this
summer, according to Paul Shapiro, director of the museum's Center for
Advanced Holocaust Studies.

However, the data will not be accessible to the general public until an
international treaty governing the release of information from the massive
ITS archives is ratified, and that is expected, some observers have said,
by the end of this year or the beginning of next year.

Once ratification occurs, the ITS documents deposited at the Holocaust
museum will be accessible only through archivists and other staffers at
the institution, according to Shapiro. Members of the public will not have
direct access via the Internet, and that has upset many survivors.

"Where does the museum get the chutzpah?" asked David Schaecter, president
of the Miami-based Holocaust Survivors Foundation. He singled out Shapiro,
the point man for the Bad Arolsen transfer.

"I don't know how in the name of God Shapiro can look at himself in the
mirror," especially after his March 28 testimony before a U.S. House of
Representatives subcommittee, Schaecter said.

However, Arthur Berger, a senior adviser to the museum on external
affairs, defended Shapiro, saying he "has probably done more than any
individual in the world to get this archive opened."

Contacted by telephone in Amsterdam, where he attended the ITS
commission's annual meeting, Shapiro said: "The whole idea is to make this
information more accessible. We want to serve these people, not frustrate
them."

But assurances of that sort haven't mollified survivors and their
advocates.

"After recent dealings with the museum, it is more and more evident that
they are not committed to the survivors in whose name this museum was
built," said Klara Firestone, founding president of Second Generation Los
Angeles and a member of the coordinating council of the Generations of the
Shoah International.

In the era of instant access to documents offered by Google, Yahoo,
Proquest and Lexis-Nexis, Holocaust survivors and advocates say they don't
understand why the documents can't be made available to local libraries or
home computers the way government documents ordinarily are accessed.

On May 9, a representative of several survivor groups sent a note to
congressional staffers who work on committees that are considering the
museum's quest for sole control of the archive. Several congressional
committees are involved with oversight of treaties and museum funding.

"The consensus - from survivors as well as community leaders - is that
something is definitely amiss here," said Samuel Dubbin, attorney for the
Holocaust Survivors Foundation, a national coalition of elected survivor
leaders. "The museum seems to be constructing an access protocol based on
a continuing sensitivity to European privacy concerns and probably in a
way that masks individual company involvement in [the] slave labor
system."

Shapiro said privacy concerns were indeed discussed, but they were not the
"principal motivating force" behind the decision to restrict the release
of the information. The primary reason the documents will not be freely
available through the Internet is that it will be difficult, if not
impossible, for the average person to find them online.

Asked if the museum's information-finding arrangement will result in
backlogs, Shapiro said "the museum is trying to do the best job it can,"
and plans to hire extra personnel, upgrade its computer system and improve
staff training in order to expedite requests for documentation.

The existing search mechanism in the Bad Arolsen archives works as fast as
Google, but museum sources said they wanted to create a proprietary search
engine that will be accessible only from on-site computers.

Esther Finder, president of the Derwood, Md.-based Generation After,
asked, "If the German government already paid to have this archive
digitized, and it is already in portable hard drives, why can't we use Bad
Arolsen's search engine. I don't understand. It seems like another
time-consuming layer of complication and expense. The Holocaust survivors
want this information and they want it where they can have easy and
immediate access to it. What if you don't live in Washington?"

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who
served on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council under three presidents,
added, "I would hope that the Bad Arolsen archives could be as easily
accessible as modern science makes possible. Those archives are for the
survivors' needs and use first, and scholars later."

Some survivors assert that the archive transfer is just a pretext for the
museum to engage in aggressive fundraising. Schaecter bristled as he
recalled a recent experience.

"I come back from Washington after I testified before the House about
these archives," he recalled in an interview. "I'm not home for six hours,
I get a call from the Boca office of the museum from their fund-raiser,
and he says, 'I heard about your testimony and I heard about you caring' -
and all this nonsense! 'Since you are deeply involved,' he says, 'maybe
you should make a meaningful donation.' "

It "would be such an unbelievable blow if the museum gets these records,"
he said.

Berger, however, said the museum was the natural U.S. choice to house the
archive.

"As America's national memorial for victims of the Holocaust and one of
the two largest repositories of Holocaust-related documentation in the
world" - the other is the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem,
which also will receive the Bad Arolsen documents - "the museum is the
appropriate site in the United States for this collection," he said.

Menachem Rosensaft, founding chair of International Network of Children of
Jewish Holocaust survivors, who served for a decade on the museum council,
asserted, "I have great respect for Paul Shapiro. I am also convinced that
without the museum and U.S. government, we would not have the archive. But
the museum is not immune to criticism or difference of opinion. I am a
firm believer that all documentation and archives should be as widely
accessible as is humanly and technologically possible. So long as there
are no longer legal impediments, I see absolutely no reason why the
documents should not be made accessible on the Internet."

The first 10 million images of concentration camp documents will transfer
to the museum under embargo, pending full ratification of the treaty
releasing the documents. The 11-nation commission that controls the
International Tracing Service initialed a May 16, 2006, treaty authorizing
release, but each of the 11 nations must ratify the treaty under its
existing laws. Shapiro said the public will first have access to the ITS
files, at most, "some months" after ratification.

The last four countries - France, Greece, Italy and Luxemburg - are
expected to ratify the release late this year or early next year. Once
ratified, national delegates must sign the single, controlling copy of the
treaty; only then will the treaty be approved and implemented.

Despite repeated requests, the museum has refused to provide a copy of the
11-nation treaty, claiming it was secret.

Congressional sources and State Department sources scoffed at that
characterization. A copy of the treaty obtained by JTA confirms that it
does not prohibit an American institution from placing the digitized files
on the Internet or a national database that can be easily accessed.

(source: Washington Jewish Week)