Holocaust survivors are dying off, yet...

Post-Gazette ^ | Sunday, August 12, 2007 | EDWIN BLACK

[Calpernia]

Holocaust survivors are dying off, yet the most complete records of the genocide remain difficult for them to see

A bitter, public war has erupted between grass-roots Holocaust survivor organizations and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum over some 16 miles of Holocaust-era records held by the International Tracing Service at Bad Arolsen, Germany. The archive contains some 42 million records of the incarceration and enslavement of 17 million Nazi victims, about 70 percent of which are digitized. Until recently, the files were secret.

A 2006 treaty negotiated among the 11 nations of the International Tracing Commission that control the records calls for complete sets of copies to be distributed to each country. But France and Italy have yet to ratify it. Italian sources say their ratification process may take an additional year or two. That delay is heartbreaking to hundreds of thousands of elderly Holocaust survivors dying daily of old age and desperate to trace the fate of their loved ones.

Meanwhile, Bad Arolsen's files could be made Internet-ready within three to four months, according to senior ITS technology officials. But the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the prime mover in releasing the records internationally, is intent on sequestering the data in its own on-site terminals in Washington instead of making them available on the Internet or via a remote secure database accessible to Holocaust survivors in local libraries or their homes the way most government documents are accessible these days. The museum's physical-transfer approach involves a complicated, costly, time-consuming process of data exports, system reintegration and a computer infrastructure built from scratch. Once completed, Holocaust survivors and their families would have to travel to Washington to access the records or otherwise use the museum as a middleman.

[Calpernia]

11-nation commission agrees to start transferring Nazi archive to Holocaust researchers

Russia declassifies military archives dating back to 1941-1945

Second World War MI5 documents revealed

(snip) surveillance against the National Lawyers Guild, an organization founded in 1937 and long associated with the labor movement and liberal causes.

As Colin Moynihan reports in The Times, the F.B.I. turned over copies of some 400,000 pages from its files on the group under a 1977 lawsuit. In 1997, the copies were donated by the guild’s lawyers to the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University with the understanding that they could be made available to the public this year.

The Genocide Generals: secret recordings explode the myth they knew nothing about the Holocaust

CPUSA gives its archives to University An original copy of Joe HillÂ’s pencil-written will, `My Will is easy to decide/ For there is nothing to divideÂ’, written the night before a Utah firing squad executed him in 1915 and later put to music, is among the gems in a vast collection of papers and photographs donated by the Communist Party USA to New York University.

The material from the entire period of the Party’s history includes secret code words for branches and actions, underground names of leaders, personal letters, and directions for how good party members should behave (no charity work, for instance). The donation includes 20,000 books, journals and pamphlets and a million photographs from The Daily Worker¹s archives. Hardly any of the files were reviewed by the Party before being given away.

The collection is so vast that it will take years to catalogue. Many new dissertations and books are expected to result from the new archives, which are likely to revise the obsessive focus of external historians in the past on the Party’s supposed subservience to Moscow, neglecting Communists work in organising labour and fighting racism. Much contentious `scholarship’ is now expected to be massively revised. Much personal insight is likely to come from the huge number of files of detailed complaints of police brutality against African-Americans and “piles” of prison correspondence from activists.

http://dlib.nyu.edu/eadapp/transform?source=tamwag/rcp.xml&style=tamwag/tamwag.xsl&part=body
Guide to the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. Collection
1975-1979

Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives
Elmer Holmes Bobst Library
70 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012

Phone: (212) 998-2630
Fax: (212) 995-4225
E-mail: gail.malmgreen@nyu.edu
© 1999 Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. All rights reserved.

New York University Libraries, Publisher
Processed by Stacy Kinlock
Machine-readable finding aid derived from a SGM EAD v1 finding aid dated: 1999. Machine-readable finding aid created by Apex Data Services. Description is in English.
2004 Electronic finding aid revised according to local applications by Brian Stevens.

Descriptive Summary
Creator: Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.
Title: Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. Collection
Dates: 1975-1979
Abstract: The Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) was a Maoist organization founded in 1975 as the successor to the Revolutionary Union (founded in 1968). The collection consists of central committee bulletins and position papers, as well as pamphlets, flyers, and items from related organizations of the era.

Quantity: 1 linear feet (1 box)
Call Phrase: Tamiment 090

[Calpernia]

Click for more

Secret Bad Arolsen Holocaust Archive—a trove of Revelations about Holocaust Insurance, Corporate Complicity and IBM involvement.

by Edwin Black

Bad Arolsen series honored by an Integrity Award for
News Coverage

The world's largest Holocaust archive, the International Tracing Service in Germany, has finally agreed to open its secret files. Now in a series of exclusive reports, Edwin Black reports first time details of what’s inside, section by section, complete with filing and record group numbers. The evidence is that Bad Arolsen holds more than the terrifying history of millions of individual victims, but also how big corporations, insurance companies profited. What’s more, the evidence of IBM’s involvement in the day to day victimization of Europe is only further magnified with thousands of new documents. Moreover, Black’s latest coverage has revealed the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s plans to sequester the documents to its own site in Washington, or function as a middleman vetting all requests, plans which have outraged survivors and second generation members. From coast to coast, members of the Holocaust community have gone on the record to vocally disapprove of the Museum's plans and urge Congress to mandate remote access via the Internet or a universally accessible database like any other government documents are.

Read Updated Perspective and Analysis articles about the Museum's continuing conflict with Holocaust Survivors over the Bad Arolsen documents – July 2007: As Holocaust survivors become increasingly militant about their right to remotely access the Bad Arolsen documents and the Museum becomes increasingly entrenched, Edwin Black provides some analysis and perspective on some of the legal issues over ownership and access.