Jerusalem – A digital recorder copies a 46-year-old video of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Other machines digitize audio testimonies taped by Holocaust survivors. And microfilmed war documents flash across a digital scanner.
Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial is getting its archive ready to go online.
In Washington, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is reproducing millions of pages of wartime records in digital format.
But one more archive – perhaps the mother lode from history’s worst genocide – is missing.
In Bad Arolsen, Germany, technicians are scanning the largest closed collection of Nazi documents, sheet by sheet. The archive is managed by the International Tracing Service, created by the International Committee of the Red Cross in the aftermath of World War II to track down missing people and help reunite families.
The ITS files comprise the most complete record on Nazi victims. Its estimated 50 million pages of documents contain the names of 17.5 million murdered or persecuted people, about one-fourth of them Jews.
After years of pressure from victims groups and from the United States, the 11 nations that govern the Tracing Service decided in May 2006 to make the records accessible for the first time to researchers and to survivors. Each country’s archive would be offered electronic copies.
That decision cheered aging survivors, who believed they finally might find clues to the fate of friends, old neighbors and villages that vanished in the Nazi inferno.
But their mood turned angry when they learned that the decision required ratification by all 11 countries – a process expected to be completed only later this year. Even then, they still won’t be able to browse the files freely. Instead, staff will search for material they request.
“Such an arrangement falls far short of genuine open access,” said the Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation in Miami. Survivors want to see the records “with our own eyes and on our own terms.”
At Yad Vashem, information technology chief Michael Lieber says the documents are too disorganized. “Even if the member states resolved to put it on the Internet, there wouldn’t be much point,” he said.
