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Chillingly meticulous - to a deadly degree

"He was a Jew with missing teeth and flat feet. He was married with three children. He fixed heaters, wore reading glasses and wheezed with bronchitis. On March 28, 1943, he surrendered his trousers, winter coat, socks, slippers and shaving kit and stepped through the gates of Auschwitz.

The man known as Max C. is a ghost of pencil and ink, shreds of his memory preserved by the notations of those who made up the Nazi bureaucracy of death. These officers, guards and clerks logged the mundane and the mesmerizing across millions of pages, their meticulous keystrokes and ornate penmanship belying the brutality of their trade.

Max C.'s Auschwitz medical card listed a cursory history: hand injury, missed five days of concentration camp work, Dec. 31, 1943; open head wound, March 31, 1944; gangrene, May 16, 1944; virus, July 9, 1944.

He was transferred to Buchenwald. The last medical report is for a back injury on March 30, 1945 — two weeks before the camp was liberated. There is no mention of Max C. after that.

Such stories are stacked in files here at the Red Cross International Tracing Service, which houses one of the largest collections of documents on World War II concentration and slave labor camps. The service was founded in 1943 to search for missing persons. It has unearthed the facts and fates of millions of Nazi victims, and this year the organization is expected to open its archives to historians and scholars for the first time. A Times reporter was recently shown samples of the papers."


So reports the LA Times. Read the full chilling article, here, on the meticulous records the Nazis kept - on just about everything.

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