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The director of the largest archive of Nazi death camp records sought approval Wednesday to prepare the documents for international access, saying he expects the long-closed collection will be ready for research within a year.


Reto Meister, head of the International Tracing Service that runs the archive in the German spa town of Bad Arolsen, said the core documents — incarceration records, death catalogs, camp registries and transportation lists — will be digitally scanned and ready for transfer to Holocaust institutions within two months.


"It's been going even faster than anticipated," Meister said as the 11-nation committee that controls the archive began a two-day meeting in The Hague. "We have been dedicating more resources to scanning the documents and integrating them into a database."


But the committee must give its approval for the complex technical preparations for transferring digital copies to organizations such as the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and to Israel's Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem.


The entire collection of 30 million to 50 million pages, filling 16 miles of shelf and cabinet space in six buildings, will be 95 percent scanned by the end of the year, Meister said. They include 3.4 million postwar files on displaced persons, many containing detailed testimonies on the horrors endured during Hitler's 12-year rule.

Schließlich gibt es noch die Historische Abteilung, die allgemeine Dokumente über Verfolgung und KZs enthält. Deren »nicht-personenbezogener« Bestand (im Umfang von rund zwei Prozent des Gesamtbestands des Archivs) wurde gnädigerweise Anfang 1996 für die Forschung geöffnet.

A May 14 [2007] meeting of the 11-nation committee that oversees the archive is expected to authorize the partial transfer, but only on condition that an embargo be imposed on accessing the materials.

The embargo is needed because four of the 11 nations that must ratify the release of the documents -- Greece, Italy, Luxembourg and France -- have yet to do so.

European sources familiar with the process suggested that Belgium and France would not sign the agreement until after this summer or even early next year because of domestic electoral considerations. Still, the process of data transfer is being accelerated to prepare for the eventual release.

The Holocaust museum has agreed to keep the documents secret until authorized by the 11-government committee -- meaning that for now, at least, the archive's legacy of secrecy will transfer as well.

Museum officials declined to confirm the information or provide details on the pending transfer.

JTA has learned, however, that the transfer will include 10 million digitized images of documents to be transported in several 500-gigabyte hard drives that plug into any computer via a simple USB connection. Small, lightweight, portable drives obviate the prospect of managing linear miles of archival documents.

[...]

The Bad Arolsen collection includes records of more than 19 million individuals. Holocaust museum sources admit that massive linguistic training would be needed before the staff could even begin to provide information.

Sources suggest that the information would be accessed mainly via a few on-site computer terminals at the museum. Terminal access would be strictly prohibited from outside the building, even though remote access is routinely available for government and historical databases.

[...]

"I don't think Washington would be an appropriate place for the documents because the majority of survivors live in New York or Miami," said Leo Rechter, president of the National Association of Holocaust Survivors. "We know that 50,000 survivors live in New York City. Relatively few live in Washington, D.C. The majority of survivors are not computer savvy.

[...]

David Mermelstein , co-chairman of Miami Holocaust Survivors of Dade County, agreed.

"If the files are in Washington, it would be a problem. It should be in Florida, Brooklyn, Chicago and Los Angeles, he said. "We have 10,000 survivors here. Most of them of them do not use computers or they have bad eyesight."

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) — Diplomats from 11 countries agreed Tuesday to bypass legal obstacles and begin distributing electronic copies of documents from a secretive Nazi archive, making them available to Holocaust researchers for the first time in more than a half century.

The decision was meant to avoid further delays in allowing Holocaust survivors to find their own stories and family histories, and for historians to seek new insights into Europe's darkest period.

The countries governing the archive maintained by the International Tracing Service approved a plan to begin transferring scanned documents as soon as they are ready so that receiving institutions can begin preparing them for public use, said a delegate, requesting anonymity because a formal announcement was due later Tuesday.

The decision circumvents the requirement to withhold the documents until all 11 countries ratify the 2006 treaty amendments that enabled the unsealing of the documents. Ratification is still pending in four countries, and Tuesday's vote was likely to shave several months from the distribution timetable.