GERMANY: Previously restricted, the Arolsen archive will offer historians wider access, writes Derek Scally
Leading historians have welcomed Germany's announcement that it will open a huge archive documenting the fate of 17 million Nazi forced labourers, Holocaust victims and survivors.
The archive's 47 million files fill 23km (14 miles) of shelving in six buildings in the baroque town of Bad Arolsen near Kassel in central Germany. But, for the last 50 years, the archive was open only to victims of the Nazi regime and their families.
"Clearly all historians will welcome the release of these files in the hope that the conditions under which they are made available aren't unduly restrictive," said Prof Richard J Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge.
The Arolsen archive contains concentration camp work books, death books and complete prisoner lists from the Buchenwald and Dachau camps.
One building's shelves hold thousands of brown envelopes containing yellowing photographs, wallets, pocket-watches and other personal effects removed from concentration camp inmates.
The archive is managed by the International Tracing Service (ITS), an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross, set up to reunite families separated by the second World War.
The ITS operates under the provisions of the 1955 Bonn Agreements signed by West German authorities and 10 other countries, including Poland and Israel. The agreement stipulates that the files should only be accessible for humanitarian purposes to survivors of the National Socialist regime and their families.
Historians have been allowed access to the archive in the last decade, but the provisions of the treaty and Germany's strict privacy laws prevented access to "personal files" which comprise around 98 per cent of the records.
The only way to allow wider access to the files would be to change the terms of the 1955 agreement which, in turn, requires the unanimous support of the signatory countries.
A working group was set up to break the deadlock over how to balance historian access with the right to privacy of individuals mentioned in the files.
German justice minister Brigitte Zypries has said Berlin will agree next month to allow wider access to researchers.
"This archive will have immense historical significance and will be a terrific boon for scholars for several generations," said Sara Bloomfield, director of the US Holocaust Museum.
Six decades after the end of the second World War, the ITS still receives 150,000 applications annually from former forced labourers and Holocaust survivors. The organisation is funded entirely by the German government, but ITS officials say recent budget and staff cuts - 100 employees have been let go in the last six years - will mean an increased workload and a growing applications backlog when the archive is opened.
"If the working group agrees to new tasks, then it will have to decide where the funding to finance these new activities will come from," said Udo Jost, spokesman for the ITS.
Seven years ago the ITS began an ambitious project to digitise the archive. Employees operate 15 scanners for 13 hours non-stop every day and have already digitised the card index of 47 million entries and 56 per cent of the main archive.
At this rate, the ITS expects to complete its digital archive next year and to make it available to the other 10 signatory countries.
"After the changes in the Bonn Agreements are implemented into international law, it will then be up to each state to make the archive available under its own data protection provisions," said a justice ministry spokesman in Berlin.