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Posted on 06/03/2004 6:14:42 PM PDT by Alouette
The International Tracing Service, which stores information about inmates of Nazi concentration camps, will open its vast archives to researchers by next year, a senior official of the International Committee of the Red Cross said Wednesday.
The decision to open the files of the Red Cross-run service was made during the committee's annual meeting, held this week in Jerusalem, after years of debate, ICRC director for international law Francois Bugnion said.
The German-based and funded organization, which was founded in 1943 by the British Red Cross, has information relating to 17 million deportees, including Jews and non-Jews.
Along with the Vatican's sealed archives, it is considered to be the most important World War 2 archive still not open to historians.
The years-old debate over opening the organization's archives centered around strict European privacy laws, which were pitted against the interest of historical research.
"We tried to balance the interests and find an adequate modality to satisfy the historical research while respecting the private sphere of individuals," Bugnion said.
"Not every individual deported is necessarily 100 percent interested in getting their story out in public," said German representative Thomas Terstegen, citing forced testimony given under Nazi duress or the deportation of homosexuals as information that individuals may wish to remain private.
But while some European member countries of the 11-nation group – which includes Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States – hesitated opening the files due to strict privacy laws, the US, Britain and Israel lobbied strongly to open the archives to historians, saying this would have been the victims' strongest wish.
"The only privacy being protected by these laws is that of the criminals," said Prof. Yehuda Bauer, academic adviser to Yad Vashem, which believes that all archives should be opened to the public.
"We have a moral duty to make sure that this happens sooner rather than later," said the Foreign Ministry's director of international organizations, Daniel Meron.
The data compiled by the International Tracing Service, which is still in the process of being computerized, includes details of people's arrest, deportation, the camp or camps they were sent to, and, if known, their date of death or liberation.
With most of the data still not computerized, basic data queries to the center, which operates on an annual budget of 15 million provided by the German government, take at least two years, director Charles Biedermann said.
Bugnion and Biedermann both said that the focus of the center's work over the last two years has been on processing 900,000 requests for data due to the German program to compensate forced laborers, which is set to expire at the end of the year.
Praising what he called a "breakthrough on a complex issue," British representative Gareth Ward said the opening of the archives signalled that the "the organization has to be a different one this millennium."
The same "privacy laws" that denied survivors' benefits to insurance policies and bank accounts because they couldn't produce an official "death certificate"
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Think how many people they COULD have helped with this info. Now all the survivors and remaining family members are dead or soon will be.
Switzerland pardons 27 who smuggled Jews during WW2
MDA [Magen David Adom] membership frozen due to violence - ICRC [Red Cross]
I think you're on to something.
Last December, reunited by a journal entry at Yad Vashem. Wonder if their records were in the archives.
A miracle reunion after 65 years (brother and sister split by Holocaust)
OH MAN it known fact that thanks to Deal Vatican kept quiet about Holcaust until now
Yeah you are right Alouette prevent survivor get benefits
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is a private organization, often mixed up with International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent i.e. federation of national Red Cross societies the most people are familiar with.
ICRC is something else, corporate interest of the select few, with their own rules and hereditary membership. They often disguise themselves under vague and misleading "Red Cross" name and thus trick people into believing they are IFRC.
They have very good reason to keep their their WWII archives "wide shut" - it is their proprietary business information.
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