Nazi archive records arrive at museums

WASHINGTON (AP) — The keepers of a Nazi archive have delivered copies of Gestapo papers and concentration camp records to museums in Washington and Jerusalem, providing Holocaust survivors a paper trail of their own persecution.

Six computer hard drives bearing electronic images 20 million pages arrived late Monday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and to the Yad Vashem Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem.

Last week, the director of the International Tracing Service, custodian of the unique collection that has been locked away for a half century in Germany released the files for transfer to the two museums.

But it will be months before the archive can be used by survivors or victims' relatives to search family histories. Even after it opens to the public, navigating the vast files for specific names will be nearly impossible without a trained guide.

"Over the years, Yad Vashem has amassed a great deal of experience and knowledge in digitizing archival information and making it user friendly," Avner Shalev, Chairman of Yad Vashem, said in a statement Tuesday. "However, the material received last night is complex and vast, taken from a number of camps, which is organized in complicated and varying ways. We expect it will take a lot of resources to sift through the material and catalog it."

The hard drives contain the first tranche of digital copies from one of the world's largest Nazi archives, with the final documents scheduled to be copied and delivered by early 2009.

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