Germany to Release Archive Files on Millions of Nazi Victims

Germany bowed to decades of pressure from the US and Britain yesterday and announced that it would open a vast trove of Nazi-era papers detailing the fate of millions of Holocaust victims.

The records stored in the German village of Bad Arolsen amount to the world's largest repository of knowledge on the devastation wrought by Hitler.

Until now only individual victims have been able to check their personal records. But on Monday Germany's Justice Minister, Brigitte Zypries, said that Berlin would work with the US and others to release the files. The 11 countries that oversee the 30m-50m documents are expected to back the decision formally next month.

Yesterday a justice ministry spokesman said that digital copies of the records would be handed over to all 11 countries including Israel, the US and Britain. They had not been released earlier because of Germany's strict privacy laws.

The Allies rescued the documents at the end of the second world war from concentration camps. They include details of medical experiments, names of alleged collaborators among inmates and reports on the Lebensborn programme, under which infants fathered by German soldiers were raised in the dogma of the "master race", as well as details of all prisoners taken to Dachau and Buchenwald camps. But in the case of Auschwitz and other extermination camps the Nazis failed to record the names of countless Jewish victims who were immediately gassed.

"Overall it makes it possible to learn a lot more about the fate of individuals and to learn a lot more about the Holocaust itself: concentration camps, deportations, slave-enforced labour and displaced persons," said Paul Shapiro, director of the centre for advanced studies at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

The archive is administered by the International Tracing Service, a branch of the international committee of the Red Cross established in 1943 to help families find out what happened to their relatives. Since 2000 former slave labourers have used it to support compensation claims.