Reporter Arthur Max tells of a 21-year-old Russian, sitting before a clerk of the U.S. Army judge advocate’s office, describing the furnaces at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where he had been a prisoner until a few weeks before.
“I saw with my own eyes how thousands of Jews were gassed daily and thrown by the hundreds into pits where Jews were burning,” he said. “I saw how little children were killed with sticks and thrown into the fire.”
After half a century, the International Tracing Service is beginning to give the public access to millions of documents 16 miles of files housed in Bad Arolsen, Germany — that comprise the most complete record of Nazi persecutions in existence.
Today, the Holocaust is known in voluminous and painful detail. Yet the young Russian’s words leap off the faded page with a rawness that transports the reader back to April 1945, when World War II was still raging and the world knew little about gas chambers, genocide and the Final Solution.
The two pages of testimony, in a file randomly plucked off a shelf, are among millions of documents held by the International Tracing Service, or ITS, an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
This vast archive — many millions of files in six nondescript buildings in the small German town — contains the largest collection of records of Nazi persecutions in existence. But because of concerns about the victims’ privacy, the ITS has kept the files closed to the public for half a century, doling out information in small bits, to survivors or their descendants, on a strict need-to-know basis.
This policy, which has generated considerable animosity among Holocaust survivors and researchers, is about to change.
In May, after years of pressure from the United States and survivors’ groups, the 11 countries overseeing the archive agreed to unseal the files for scholars as well as victims and their families.
ITS has allowed Paul Shapiro of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington to look at the files. It has also given The Associated Press extensive access on condition that no names from the files are revealed unless they have been identified in other sources.
“This is powerful stuff,” said Shapiro, leafing through the file containing the Russian’s statement and some 200 other testimonies that take the reader into the very heart of Hitler’s death machine: its camps, inmates, commandants, executioners and trusted inmates used as low-level guards.
“If you sat here for a day and read these files, you’d get a picture of what it was really like in the camps, how people were treated. Look — names and names of Jewish trustee guards — the ‘little perpetrators’,” he said.
Moved to Bad Arolsen in central Germany after the war, the files occupy a former barracks of the Waffen-SS, the Nazi Party’s elite force. They are stored in long corridors of drab cabinets and neatly stenciled binders packed into floor-to-ceiling metal shelves. Their index cards alone fill three large rooms.
Mandated to trace missing people and help families reunite, ITS has allowed few people through its doors and has responded to requests for information on wartime victims with minimal data, even when its files could have told more.
It might take a year or more for the files to open fully. Until then, access remains tightly restricted.
“We will be ready any time. We would open them today, if we had the go-ahead,” the ITS interim director, Jean-Luc Blondel, said.
When the archive is finally available, researchers will have their first chance to see a unique collection of documents on concentration camps, slave labor camps and displaced people.
“There is a great deal of very interesting material on a very large number of concentration camps that we really don’t know much about,” said Yehuda Bauer, professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “It may contain surprises. We don’t know. It has material that nobody’s ever seen.”
A visitor to the archive comes into direct contact with the bureaucracy of mass murder. 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), Amsterdam address before she went into hiding (Merwerdeplein 37) and the date she was sent to a concentration camp (Sept. 3, 1944). “Frank, Annelise M.” was, of course, Anne Frank.
She was on one of the last trains to Germany before the Nazi occupation of Holland crumbled. Six months later, at age 15, she died an anonymous death, one of some 35,000 casualties of typhus that ravaged the Bergen-Belsen camp.
After the war, “The Diary of Anne Frank,” written during her 25 months hiding in a tiny apartment with seven others, would become the most widely read book ever written on the Holocaust.
But most of the lives recorded in Bad Arolsen are known to none but their families. They are people such as Cornelis Brouwenstijn, a Dutchman who vanished into the Nazi gulag at age 22 for illegally possessing a radio. In a plain manila envelope are his photo, a wallet, and some snapshots.
After the war, his family repeatedly wrote to the Red Cross asking about him. In 1949, his parents received a terse form letter saying he died sometime between April 19 and May 3, 1945, in the area of a German labor camp. The personal effects, however, remained in Bad Arolsen, and, with the family long deceased, there is no one left to apply for their return.
To critics who accuse them of being tightfisted with their information, the Red Cross and ITS counter that they have to abide by German privacy laws and protect the reputations of victims whether alive or dead. They say the files might contain unsubstantiated allegations against victims and that opening them up to researchers would distract ITS from its main task of providing documentation to survivors or victims’ relatives.
One area of study that will benefit from the ITS files is the Lebensborn program, in which children deemed to have the “proper genes” were adopted or even kidnapped to propagate the Aryan master race of Hitler’s dreams.
Another subject is the sheer scope of the Holocaust system. The files will support new research from other sources showing that the network of concentration camps, ghettos and labor camps was nearly three times more extensive than previously thought.
Postwar historians estimated about 5,000 to 7,000 detention sites. But after the Cold War ended, records began pouring out of the former communist nations of East Europe. More sites were disclosed in the past six years in claims by 1.6 million people for slave labor reparations from a $6.6 billion fund financed by the German government and some 3,000 industries.
“We have identified somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 camps and ghettos of various categories,” said Geoffrey Megargee of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, who is compiling a seven-volume encyclopedia of these detention centers.
Over the years, the International Tracing Service has answered 11 million requests to locate family members or provide certificates supporting pension claims or reparations. It says it has a 56 percent rate of success in tracing the requested name. But the workload has been overwhelming. There is at present a massive backlog of hundreds of thousands of unanswered queries. There are worries that the process takes too long since aged survivors are dying every day.
“What victims of these crimes fear the most is that when they disappear — and it’s happening very fast now — no one will remember the names of the families they lost,” Shapiro said. “If we don’t succeed in having this material public while there are still survivors, then we have failed.”
Note: The foregoing was extracted from an Associated Press report, November 21, 2006.
Footnote: What an extraordinary time we live in! On December 11 Iran hosted a conference of those, assembled from around the world, who deny the Nazi genocide and the Holocaust. (Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called the whole affair “a sick phenomenon”.)
The two-day conference, with 67 participants from 30 countries, was initiated by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He once again called the Holocaust a “myth”, and also called for Israel to be wiped off the map. Speakers asserted, among other things, that no more than a very few thousand people (including a very few Jews) were executed by the Nazis, but only for terrible crimes.
Other conference participants included two rabbis and four other members of Jews United Against Zionism. This delegation did not deny the generally recognized facts of the Holocaust, but stated that they oppose the creation of Israel on the grounds that its existence at this time violates Jewish law. (Many Orthodox Jews believe that God has exiled His people from His land until they repent, the Messiah returns, and the Temple of God is rebuilt. Thus they see a nationalist State of Israel at the present time as an affront to His Holy Name.)
Muslim “trash” is Israeli “treasure”!
Off an eastern Jerusalem side-street, between an olive orchard and an abandoned hotel, sit a few piles of stones and dirt that yield important insights into Jerusalem’s history. They come from the world’s most disputed “holy place”: the square in the heart of Jerusalem that is known to Jews as the Temple Mount.
Some finds that have emerged from the rubble are: (1) a coin struck during the Jewish revolt against the Romans, (2) arrowheads shot by Babylonian archers, and (3) the imprint of a seal possibly linked to a priestly Jewish family mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah. This last item, uncovered in 2005, is perhaps the most valuable find so far. Its incomplete Hebrew lettering appears to name “Ge’aliyahu, son of Immer”. (Immer is the name of an important family of temple officials mentioned in Jer. 20:1.)
The finds continue. On a drizzly November morning, Gabriel Barkay, the archaeologist who runs the dig, sits in a tent near the mounds examining some newly discovered coins from various occupiers of the Promised Land: the Hasmonean (i.e., Maccabean) dynasty of Jewish kings more than 2,000 years ago, a Roman procurator around the time of Pontius Pilate, the early Christians of the Byzantine Empire, two Islamic dynasties, and the British in the 20th century.
Considering the scope of findings, it is extraordinary that this is an excavation that was never supposed to happen. The Temple Mount is the frequent focal point of Israeli-Palestinian clashes, and the volatility of regional politics has largely prevented archaeologists from touching the site for the past 60 years. Wars have been started in the Middle East over far less!
Jews revere the Temple Mount as the site of their two ancient temples. But Muslims believe it’s the place from which Prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven, as told in the Koran. Two mosques stand on the site, as do some of the temple’s original retaining walls, including what Jews call the Western, or Wailing, Wall, but there is no visible trace of the ancient Jewish temple itself (even as Jesus prophesied in Matt. 24:2; Luke 19:44).
In November 1999, the Waqf [the Muslim organization that administers the site’s Islamic holy places] opened an emergency exit to an ancient underground chamber of stone pillars and arches known to Jews as Solomon’s Stables.
Ignoring fierce protests from Israeli archaeologists who said priceless artifacts were being destroyed to erase traces of Jewish history, the Waqf dug a large pit, removed tons of earth and rubble that had been used as landfill, and dumped much of it in the nearby Kidron Valley (immediately to the east of the Temple Mount: cf. 2 Sam. 15:23; Jer. 31:40; John 18:1). The Waqf takes the official position that the rubble is of recent vintage and without archaeological value.
Zachi Zweig, a 27-year-old archaeology undergraduate student from Tel Aviv, showed up at the dump a few days later. Though Israel’s archaeological establishment had shown no interest in the rubble, Zweig was sure it was important, especially after a Waqf representative told him to leave.
Zweig returned quietly with friends, gathered samples of the rubble and discovered a high concentration of ancient pottery shards. The Israel Antiquities Authority charged him with stealing relics (these charges were later dropped). But Zweig finally convinced Barkay, his professor at Bar Ilan University, that the rubble needed to be studied.
In 2004, after spending five years obtaining a dig license and raising money, they had 75 truckloads of rubble moved to the slopes of Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus. (Scopus is the northernmost of four mountains that comprise what is commonly called the Mount of Olives today.)
Barkay’s dig is financed by the City of David Foundation, a group that spends most of its money settling Jewish families in Arab neighborhoods in eastern Jerusalem. This is part of an attempt to make the point that Jerusalem belongs to the Jews.
The Waqf says it wasn’t destroying evidence of Jewish presence there — because there isn’t any! “I have seen no evidence of a temple,’ said the Waqf ’s director, Adnan Husseini. He had heard “stories,’ he said, “but these are an attempt to change the situation here today, and any change would be very dangerous.’
Such reactions don’t surprise Israeli historian Gershom Gorenberg, whose book The End of Days documents the fight over the Temple site. “Dig a centimeter beneath the debate over antiquities,’ he said, “and you hit the debate over whom the Mount belongs to, and a centimeter beneath that is the war over whom the entire country belongs to.’
[Some information is taken from an Associated Press report, by Matti Friedman, Nov. 18, 2006.]
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“Then the LORD will go out and fight against those nations, as he fights in the day of battle. On that day his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, east of Jerusalem” (Zech. 14:3,4).
“Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple” (Mal. 3:1).
“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’ ” (Matt. 23:37-39).
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Editor’s Postscript: I asked Bro. Leen Ritmeyer, recognized authority on the archaeology of the Temple Mount, to comment on the above. He wrote: “I was just in Washington, DC, attending and speaking at conferences where I also met Gabriel Barkay again. Your article is a very good summary, but it does not include the latest find, which is an inscription on a stone mentioning the name of Silva, the Roman commander who took Masada. By the way, my work is also mentioned in Gershom Gorenberg’s book.”
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One