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Public access to the secrets of the Nazi Holocaust "Those people who said the Holocaust didn't happen, like the president of Iran, if they have any questions about it, please come to Bad Arolsen and check it out for themselves." (Miki Schwartz)
Holocaust documents opened to public
By Henk Kamsteeg
Last year, Iran hosted a two-day conference to explore the validity of the Nazi Holocaust. Iranian Foreign Ministry official Manouchehr Mohammadi told Iran's state-run news agency, IRNA, that Iran's leaders would accept that the Holocaust occurred if scholars attending the conference could prove that the Nazi regime exterminated six million Jews during World War II.
There is already so much evidence related to the Holocaust that it's virtually impossible to see the denial of the Iranian leaders as anything but anti-Semitism.
However, a vast archive of 16 miles of files in six nondescript buildings in a German town, contains the fullest records of Nazi persecutions in existence.
The archive holds millions of Nazi documents such as transportation lists, concentration camp registrations, death books, and the stories of 17 million victims (not only Jews). It contains the fullest records of Nazi persecutions in existence. “This is powerful stuff,” said Paul Shapiro of the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington.
The Nazis were famous for record keeping and the thousands of filing cabinets, holding 50 million pages of “Hitler’s secret archive” is a testimony to that fact.
This Holocaust history was discovered by the Allies in dozens of concentration camps, as Germany fell in May 1945, and taken to a town in the middle of Germany, called Bad Arolsen, where they were sorted, filed and locked away in six nondescript buildings. The files have been kept close to the public for half a century, but in May 2006, an 11-nation committee overseeing the archive decided to unseal them for scholars as well as victims and their families.
CBS correspondent Scott Pelley walked through the evidence with chief archivist Udo Jost. He showed 60 Minutes a list of 1,000 prisoners saved by a factory owner who told the Nazis he needed the prisoners labor. This was the list of Oskar Schindler, made famous by the Steven Spielberg movie.
In a bound ledger with frayed binding, a copy of a list of names appears of Jews rounded up in Holland and transported to the death camps. Buried among the names is “Frank, Annelise M,” her date of birth (June 12, 1929), and the date she was sent to a concentration camp (Sept. 3, 1944).
This is Anne Frank. Six months later, aged 15, she died an anonymous death in the Bergen-Belsen camp. After the war, “The Diary of Anne Frank,” written during her 25v months hiding in a tiny apartment with seven others, would become the most read book ever written on the Holocaust.
Michael Rosenbaum from CBS tells the story of Jack Rosenthal from New York, who arrived with his family in Auschwitz. Jack and his uncle were sent to the barracks while his mother and five sisters and brothers went straight to the gas chambers and the ovens.
Jack remembers that night, “The stench was terrible. You smelled burning flesh.” American soldiers liberated Jack in 1945. On a personal effects card that he had signed at Buchenwald, there was reference to a number: A11832. That was his inmate number the Nazis tattooed on Jack’s arm. “It’s still there,” he says.
Compounding the delay in releasing the files is the cumbrous makeup of the governing committee. Any decision on their future requires the assent of all 11-member nations: Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland and the United States.
Archivist Stein says: “Former inmates and their families want to see the tangible part of their history; they want to tell their stories,” she said. What I find most frustrating is that they have all these documents and they are just sitting on them.”
Early November 2006, ITS, an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross, went some way to make amends, delivering a full inventory of its records on Buchenwald and promising to give priority in searching for 1,000 names Stein had requested.
But some delegations are worried the process will take too long, at a time when aged survivors are dying every day, among them Paul Shapiro. “If we don’t succeed in having this material public while there are still survivors, then we failed,” he said.
(Sources: CBS, Associated Press)
Even now, Germany is releasing to the public millions of Nazi-era documents related to the Holocaust. Do the deniers believe this is only now being done because the documents are forgeries and the people who were forging them are only now completing their work?