D.C. museum getting data from Germany won’t allow Internet searches, infuriating survivors who want to trace relatives
BY EDWIN BLACK
For years, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum led a crusade to release the world’s most secret and voluminous collection of Nazi-era documents, the International Tracing Service records, held at Bad Arolsen, Germany. Now digitized copies of the documents are entering designated archives in nations that control the records. In the United States, the museum is the designated recipient.
Yet the very people the museum was trying to help – Holocaust survivors who want access to the documents to learn the fate of relatives and friends – are outraged. Their grass-roots organizations are vociferously fighting the museum for remote access to the precious information that was nearly inaccessible for decades.
Leo Rechter, a Brooklyn resident and president of the National Association of Jewish Child Holocaust Survivors, insists the documents be housed in institutions near where aging survivors live, or be made available via the Internet. He argues that a trip to the Holocaust Museum site in Washington, D.C., is just too much for frail, aging war victims.
But what clout do survivors have when it comes to records of their friends’ and families’ lives? It may come down to the question of who owns these papers brimming with concentration camp documents and prisoner transfer lists.