Personal items of Nazi victims returned to relatives sixty years on

Relatives of loved ones put to death by the Nazis over sixty years ago have received their last possessions this week. Watches, photos, parcels, wallets and jewellery belonging to the resisters were discovered in a Red Cross archive in Germany.

"It is as if the ghosts of the past have walked into my life," said Gerrit Jan Evers, who learned only a few weeks ago that the effects had been found. "So many died. And now, 63 years later, I'm here holding my father's identity card in my hand," he added with tears in his eyes.

His father was rounded up in a wave of Gestapo arrests in 1944 after an attack on a German troop column that left four Nazis dead. Six hundred Dutch men and women were rounded up and sent to concentration camps where the majority of them died through maltreatment or were executed. Other items belonging to his father include an old pocket watch with cracked, yellow glass and its case, a scratched-up lock and key and a photograph with writing on the back. The Nazis had kept all the items packed in boxes, which were then confiscated by the Allies at the end of the war.

The artefacts were found by accident. The Red Cross Tracing Centre at Bad Arolsen, Germany, is the largest repository in the world of Nazi files and they have sorting through them since 1945.

Evert de Graaf, a Dutch historian working with Red Cross officials to identify the relatives of the dead, said: "We found files on 80 of them, and an envelope containing personal effects was attached to eight of them. There could be more artefacts in other files that we have to cross-reference."

This week several families went on a chartered bus from Holland to Bad Arolsen to collect the remnants of lives cut short by tyranny. "When the trip began, everyone was cheerful," De Graaf said. "But the closer we got to Bad Arolsen, the quieter everyone became."

Evers's hands shook as he opened a package to find the brittle, yellowing ID card marked "Personsbewijs" - ID card - in Dutch inside to glimpse the photograph of a gaunt, serious-looking man.

"That's my father," he says softly.

Evers is named after his father but has no recollection of him other than his mother's anecdotes. Gerrit Evers Senior died in December 1944 at Neuengamme concentration camp, near Hamburg. Three weeks later, his son was born in the Netherlands. Evers' stepson, Gerjo Mulder, said: "It's beyond belief for him that people could be so cruel to one another here, in the middle of Europe. I can't grasp it myself. I'm trying to put myself in his shoes. But I'm just 35."

Viewing his dead brother's concentration-camp registration card, Willem Dorgelo, said, "I keep trying to tell myself that it wasn't 'the Germans,' it was Adolf Hitler. Well, I try anyway. They worked him to death, starved him, for painting slogans on walls, gave him no winter clothes. He didn't survive," he said, turning over a wallet in his hand that used to belong to a man who has been dead for 63 years.

Standing next to him, Johan Dorgelo, Willem's son, said: "I hardly have anything to remember my father by. I was a baby when he was rounded up and taken away."

Daily Mail

A closely guarded Holocaust archive opens its doors

Like other Holocaust victims, Noemi Ban has gone back numerous times to survey the ghostly field of chimneys at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi concentration camp in Poland where she and her family arrived in July 1944, and she alone survived.

But last May, Ban got an even more jolting glimpse into her past, when she visited the Holocaust archive in this tranquil town in central Germany. There, filed in the labyrinthine shelves of records, was a faded scrap of paper that she remembers signing on the day she arrived at the camp from Hungary.

"I was shocked to see my handwriting," Ban, 84, said by telephone from her home in Bellingham, Washington State. "When I signed it, I had no idea why. Why they needed such precise data in that horrible place is amazing."

The Nazis kept meticulous records of their mass extermination during World War II, and much of it ended up here, in a closely guarded archive maintained by the International Tracing Service, which is administered by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Now, after more than six decades, the tracing service is opening its vast repository of information - not just to survivors like Ban, who have long had the right to see material here, but to scholars who are eager to plumb its depths for fresh insights into an unfathomable horror.

On Aug. 20, the archive plans to transfer digital copies of the first major trove of documents to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and to the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem.

The files cover 51 concentration camps and prisons, and include transportation lists, medical reports, entry documents - like the one signed by Ban - and Gestapo prison records. About 10 million documents in all, they will represent a third of the entire collection at Bad Arolsen.

Prying open the doors of Bad Arolsen has been a lengthy, politically fraught process, and it is not completely finished. Three of the 11 countries that oversee the institution have not yet ratified an amended treaty that would give historians unfettered access to the archive.

In May, though, the 11 countries, among them Germany and the United States, agreed to begin the electronic transfer even before the last three countries - Italy, France, and Greece - ratify the treaty.

"We have interpreted the decision in a way that there is no turning back," Reto Meister, the director of the tracing service, said. "It became very evident that the ITS had to change because the victims wanted it to change."

A tall, rangy Swiss national who has spent his career in places like Iraq and Lebanon for the Red Cross, Meister has made it his mission to dispel Bad Arolsen's reputation as a secret Nazi archive - a characterization he contends was always a bit exaggerated.

Outside experts on the Holocaust, who have long pushed for more access, said he had been remarkably successful.

"I have a good deal of admiration for how far he's moved the place," said Paul Shapiro, the director of advanced Holocaust studies at the museum in Washington. "He's dealing with a staff that, for a very long time, operated in a closed and secretive manner. He also has to balance multiple forces."

Among those is the German government, which pays nearly $20 million a year for the upkeep of the tracing service and its 320 employees. Until last year, Germany opposed granting wider access to the archive, contending that it would violate privacy standards.

The documents include confidential personal information, like reports of medical experiments carried out on prisoners, and accusations of murder and homosexuality made by the Nazis to discredit people.

Much of the material was discovered by Allied forces when they liberated the camps at the end of World War II. They dumped the files in a complex of vacated SS barracks in Bad Arolsen, which was conveniently located near the border dividing the U.S. and British occupation zones.

Few historians doubt there is a wealth of dramatic, wrenching personal stories in the archives. Shapiro said he expected enormous interest from researchers, who previously had to rely on documents in government archives in Washington, London and Moscow, which focused less on individual victims than on the Nazi system.

Among the files on displaced persons here is a sheaf of drawings and illustrations by a Latvian refugee who was conscripted into the German Army in 1944 and ordered to dig trenches in Germany.

Among those watching Bad Arolsen most closely are lawyers for Holocaust victims and their relatives. They cited the archive this year in opposing a settlement with an Italian insurer, Assicurazioni Generali, over unpaid claims on life insurance policies.

As part of the settlement in February, Generali agreed to give heirs of Holocaust victims until next August to uncover evidence of unpaid claims at Bad Arolsen. Officials there said no one had made inquiries.

The complexity of the archive, combined with the flood of inquiries, resulted in a huge backlog of requests - 450,000 at its peak earlier in the decade, causing a wait of several years for a response. The backlog is now down to 75,000, but officials say new requests are answered within eight weeks.

As records are transmitted to Washington and Jerusalem, part of this research burden will shift to the Holocaust Museum and Yad Vashem. Shapiro said he expected a wave of inquiries. Some survivors have already complained that the museum is playing a gatekeeper role.

While it would have been nice to wait for new technology to organize the archive, Shapiro said, the advancing age of Holocaust survivors - many are over 80 - makes it vital to answer requests as soon as possible. "That's a big job, but it's one we're committed to doing," he said.

International Herald Tribune