The Jewish News Weekly of Northern California reports:
"Despite all the books and articles that have been written about the Holocaust, even more stories yet to be told have been hidden away in Bad Arolsen, Germany.
It’s taken 60 years for 11 nations to agree that records there should be revealed. Until now these secret documents were available only to survivors and their nuclear families who were tracing the whereabouts of loved ones. But even then the survivors has to go through years of heartbreaking persistence before seeing the files.
The archive is being opened now only because intense pressure — much of it originating from the U.S. Holocaust Museum and Memorial — managed to force an agreement among the 11-nation commission that owns the archive. It’s housed at the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen.
Those countries are the United States, France, England, Belgium, Greece, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland and Israel, plus the two former Axis powers, Italy and Germany. The International Red Cross was given custody and control of the archive, but only pursuant to the agreement.
Parts of the archive are expected to be available to the public sometime this year. But the entire archive might not be digitized until 2008 or later.
So what’s in this secret archive?
Only an estimated 25 percent of the prodigious collection relates to Jews. The remainder covers the fate of Gypsies, Poles, Dutch, and other groups targeted for oppression and destruction. Taken as a whole, the documents provide details of how the Nazis masterminded the elimination of European Jewry and other enemies of the Third Reich.
It offers vast additional proof of IBM’s minute-to-minute involvement in the 12-year Holocaust, new insights into the corporate beneficiaries of Germany’s slave and forced labor programs, an explosion of evidence that insurance companies participated in and benefited from the decimation of the Jews, and the dark details of persecution suffered by millions of individuals who would have otherwise disappeared into the bleak vastness of Hitler’s war against humanity."
"Despite all the books and articles that have been written about the Holocaust, even more stories yet to be told have been hidden away in Bad Arolsen, Germany.
It’s taken 60 years for 11 nations to agree that records there should be revealed. Until now these secret documents were available only to survivors and their nuclear families who were tracing the whereabouts of loved ones. But even then the survivors has to go through years of heartbreaking persistence before seeing the files.
The archive is being opened now only because intense pressure — much of it originating from the U.S. Holocaust Museum and Memorial — managed to force an agreement among the 11-nation commission that owns the archive. It’s housed at the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen.
Those countries are the United States, France, England, Belgium, Greece, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland and Israel, plus the two former Axis powers, Italy and Germany. The International Red Cross was given custody and control of the archive, but only pursuant to the agreement.
Parts of the archive are expected to be available to the public sometime this year. But the entire archive might not be digitized until 2008 or later.
So what’s in this secret archive?
Only an estimated 25 percent of the prodigious collection relates to Jews. The remainder covers the fate of Gypsies, Poles, Dutch, and other groups targeted for oppression and destruction. Taken as a whole, the documents provide details of how the Nazis masterminded the elimination of European Jewry and other enemies of the Third Reich.
It offers vast additional proof of IBM’s minute-to-minute involvement in the 12-year Holocaust, new insights into the corporate beneficiaries of Germany’s slave and forced labor programs, an explosion of evidence that insurance companies participated in and benefited from the decimation of the Jews, and the dark details of persecution suffered by millions of individuals who would have otherwise disappeared into the bleak vastness of Hitler’s war against humanity."
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