Holocaust file-sharing leaves needless hurdles

D.C. museum getting data from Germany won't allow Internet searches, infuriating survivors who want to trace relatives

Remember all the fanfare about the records being made public? The ones that were going to settle the issue once and for all about what happened in the slave-labor camps? Well, after being released in Germany the records will be locked up again in Holocaust museums around the world, and no internet searches will be allowed. The museums will control what records are allowed to be seen. THE TRUTH NEEDS NO PROTECTION!

BY EDWIN BLACK - July 10, 2007
Edwin Black is author of "IBM and the Holocaust."

For years, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum led a crusade to release the world's most secret and voluminous collection of Nazi-era documents, the International Tracing Service records, held at Bad Arolsen, Germany. Now digitized copies of the documents are entering designated archives in nations that control the records. In the United States, the museum is the designated recipient.

Yet the very people the museum was trying to help - Holocaust survivors who want access to the documents to learn the fate of relatives and friends - are outraged. Their grass-roots organizations are vociferously fighting the museum for remote access to the precious information that was nearly inaccessible for decades.

Leo Rechter, a Brooklyn resident and president of the National Association of Jewish Child Holocaust Survivors, insists the documents be housed in institutions near where aging survivors live, or be made available via the Internet. He argues that a trip to the Holocaust Museum site in Washington, D.C., is just too much for frail, aging war victims.

But what clout do survivors have when it comes to records of their friends' and families' lives? It may come down to the question of who owns these papers brimming with concentration camp documents and prisoner transfer lists.

The mammoth archive is maintained by the International Red Cross as custodian for a postwar commission of 11 nations. The papers, captured by the Allies during World War II, are governed by a multilateral treaty that originally limited access to families tracing loved ones, presumably for privacy reasons, and required excruciatingly long written inquiries. Legendary backlogs frequently made requests for tracing a years-long exercise in painful frustration.

A new treaty, already ratified by nine of the 11 nations, transfers a digital copy under embargo, pending full ratification. The documents go to a single repository in each of the countries. Each repository is entitled to grant access "in accordance with the relevant national law and national archival regulations and practices."

Therein lies the debate.

The Holocaust Museum's plan is to restrict access to its own on-site computers. For those who cannot visit, the museum promises it will take requests by phone, e-mail or fax, training a small army of staff helpers to function in a long list of languages, from Russian to Yiddish to Dutch. This is the same system that's been in place in Bad Arolsen all these years.

Survivors, dying daily, say that not only will the museum's plans will take years to implement, they simply transfer the backlog and inaccessibility from Germany to Washington.

For sure, the new collection will dwarf any archival endeavor the museum has ever tackled. Last year without this new collection, the museum was strapped to cope with about 8,000 archival requests. During that same period the Red Cross was backlogged with 425,000 requests, some stretching back almost a decade due to the behemoth size and scope of the International Tracing Service files, which cover 17.5 million individuals.

While copies are being transferred to commission countries such as Luxembourg and Greece, it is anticipated that the U.S. museum will be the prime dispenser of the information. The United States is home to about 180,000 survivors, second to Israel, and many more non-Jewish victims of Nazism.

Survivors are virtually unified in demanding access via some standard database that can be remotely accessed from local libraries, universities or even from homes via the Internet, the way other governmental and historic documents are routinely accessed. Museum officials confirm no bar to such access exists by treaty.

Effective searching software already exists. If it were simply copied into computers in the museum, it could then be exported to be available remotely. Bad Arolsen's two existing search engines work as fast as Google and are sophisticated enough to transliterate Cyrillic Russian characters into phonetic English. Bad Arolsen archivist Udo Yost said, "The system is good and getting better," adding that it does not need to be reinvented.

A defensive museum press office would not explain its decision to create new proprietary software and restrict access.

The legal dynamics of the Tracing Service files are fundamentally unprecedented. True, the National Archives eventually returned to Germany most of its millions of captured Nazi documents, but retained ownership of America's copies. However, Bad Arolsen's 30 million to 50 million pages encompass documents originally belonging to nations across Europe and then transferred to the commission. America, by treaty, will own only its digital copy, and only Congress can legislate the specifics of custody and access to the digital copy.

Who really owns and controls the Bad Arolsen files? The survivors argue that regardless of who has custody, the files belong to history. And because the survivors are pivotal to the history, that makes the files theirs.

Copyright 2007 Newsday Inc.