August 21



USA:

Nazi archive records arrive at museums


The keepers of a Nazi archive have delivered copies of Gestapo papers and
concentration camp records to museums in Washington and Jerusalem,
providing Holocaust survivors a paper trail of their own persecution.

Six computer hard drives bearing electronic images 20 million pages
arrived late Monday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington
and to the Yad Vashem Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in
Jerusalem.

Last week, the director of the International Tracing Service, custodian of
the unique collection that has been locked away for a half century in
Germany released the files for transfer to the two museums.

But it will be months before the archive can be used by survivors or
victims' relatives to search family histories. Even after it opens to the
public, navigating the vast files for specific names will be nearly
impossible without a trained guide.

"Over the years, Yad Vashem has amassed a great deal of experience and
knowledge in digitizing archival information and making it user friendly,"
Avner Shalev, Chairman of Yad Vashem, said in a statement Tuesday.
"However, the material received last night is complex and vast, taken from
a number of camps, which is organized in complicated and varying ways. We
expect it will take a lot of resources to sift through the material and
catalog it."

The hard drives contain the first tranche of digital copies from one of
the world's largest Nazi archives, with the final documents scheduled to
be copied and delivered by early 2009.

"This first transfer is the beginning of a major undertaking," said the
Washington museum's director, Sara J. Bloomfield in a statement Tuesday.
"Our goal is to help survivors."

The museums now face a complex task of organizing the material on the hard
drives, which is so vast, it will take days to transfer to museum
computers, according to Paul Shapiro, director of the museum's Center for
Advanced Holocaust Studies.

The museum has been training researchers to work with the documents. An
index of about 17.5 million names on file with ITS is the key to finding
documents and will arrive this year. The index has been scanned from about
50 million cards in varying formats, organizational systems and even
scripts.

Most documents in the archive are written by hand, sometimes in old German
script. They also contain variations in the spelling of names, many of
which are recorded phonetically. That makes it impossible, for now, to
convert large numbers of files to a digitally searchable form.

"You can't Google them," Shapiro says. "The question is how do we get
people what they want?"

One tool the museum is preparing is a search engine it plans to make
accessible soon on the Internet. It will allow people to search through a
separate, limited index of the archive and get a sense of what kind of
documents exist. That index describes tranches of the documents, where
they came from and where they are stored. It could provide clues about
whether the information users are seeking might be there.

Though the museums' researchers can begin working with the material
immediately, the public must wait for legal formalities to conclude which
could take several more months.

Unlocking the archive required all 11 countries to amend their
international treaty. France, Italy and Greece have yet to complete the
process. The others on the commission are the United States, Israel,
Britain, Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Luxembourg and Germany.

Bloomfield called on three countries which have not ratified to do so
urgently.

Historians believe the files, which contain information on some 17.5
million individuals, will add texture to the narrative of misery in the
camps, where millions of people were worked to death or were simply
exterminated with industrial efficiency. Six million Jews died in the
Holocaust, one of every three Jews on earth.

The Associated Press has been given repeated access to the archive in Bad
Arolsen in recent months. Random searches through its 16 linear miles of
files revealed a wealth of mundane yet telling detail on life and death in
the camps.

(source: Associated Press)