On December 17th, I wrote a diary about the opening of the Nazi concentration camp archives:
For the first time, secrets of the Nazi Holocaust that have been hidden away for more than 60 years are finally being made available to the public. We’re not talking about a missing filing cabinet - we’re talking about thousands of filing cabinets, holding 50 million pages. It's Hitler’s secret archive.
[video]
[transcript]
Which led to this agreement yesterday:
Electronic copies of documents from a closely guarded Nazi archive will start flowing to several countries for the first time since World War II, following an agreement announced Tuesday by the 11 countries that govern the archive in central Germany.
More below the fold...
The agreement between the eleven countries that control the Bad Arelson archive will give digitized access of over 50 million documents that tell the story of the 17.5 million people who passed through the Nazi concentration camps (those survived or not) in irrefutable (un-revisable) terms.
What's in the 50 million records?
The file of "Frank, Annaliese Marie," better known as Anne Frank. It’s her paper trail from Amsterdam to Bergen-Belsen, where she died at the age of 15.
They also have the actual Schindler's list...
A good day for the truth, despite the difficult subject, as academics and those who seek to deny the deniers will now be able to back up their truths with exact proof.
That's not to say this hasn't been a difficult negotiation:
France, Italy, Luxembourg and Greece have not yet ratified the treaty. Luxembourg has indicated that ratification is imminent, while the other three nations have not raised any fresh hurdles, according to people who attended the two-day meeting.
The seven countries that have ratified the amended treaty are the United States, Germany, Israel, Belgium, Poland, Britain and the Netherlands. The United States had pushed aggressively to open the archive, clashing with Germany, which long resisted because of concerns about privacy.
The agreement, once the amended treaty is ratified by all signatories, will give electronic access to the International Red Cross's tracing service, organizations such as the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC and to scholars worldwide.
In anticipation of the agreement, a spokesman for the Holocaust Museum confirms that "virtually all the files relating to concentration camps have already been scanned."
As I said in my first diary about this, the release of these documents is a direct repudiation of deniers. There's a certain weight in the truth and the archives' truth, 50 million pages thick, outweighs any lies.
Here's the link to the NY Times story.
And to my prior diary, which has the link to the video and transcript of the 60 minutes episode.
Original tags: Holocaust, Revisionism, History, Adolf Hitler, Nazis
[Update] This diary was hijacked in a direct violation of the following rule:
This was a thread hijack (4+ / 0-)
that got even worse.
If it happens again, we'll have to act.
I don't know how many people are going to see this, but this is a general announcment to the combatants in this subthread. The time and energy that these fights are taking for admins is getting to be far too much.
We have two choices, ban the lot of you, which will happen if these hijackings and fights spill into other, non-I/P diaries, or stay hands off and let you beat each other up in the threads.
There are really no innocent parties in these fights, so there isn't a "side" to take when everyone is behaving badly. We don't want to have mass bannings, so you're going to have to figure out how to handle this without running to the admins every time.
But if it gets out of the I/P threads, we will have to ban.
by mcjoan on Wed Feb 21, 2007 at 02:24:29 PM PDT
This is a non-I/P diary. The above rule has been violated.
I ask everyone who is posting (relentlessly) in support of the hijacked threads to stop.