Opening up of the Bad Arolsen Holocaust Archives in Germany

Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Europe, hearing on Opening up of the Bad Arolsen Holocaust Archives in Germany, March 28, 2007.

  • United States Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (U.S. Helsinki Commission) Chairman Alcee L. Hastings (D-Florida), March 14, 2007 press release: “The Holocaust archives located in Bad Arolsen remain the largest closed Second World War-era archives in the world. Inside the archives are 50 million records that disclose the fate of some 17.5 million individual victims of Nazism. In order to allow for open access to these important archives, each of the 11 members of the International Commission of the International Tracing Service (ITS) (the United States, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, and the United Kingdom) must individually ratify through their respective parliaments the May 2006 amendments to the 1955 Bonn Accords. To date, however, only 4 out of the 11 Commission member countries (the United States, Israel, Poland and the Netherlands) have ratified the treaty.”
  • H. Res. 240 (approved by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, March 27, 2007), bipartisan legislation urging all European nations to allow for open access to the Holocaust archives located in Bad Arolsen, Germany.
  • AP: “The Associated Press, which was granted extensive access to the archive in recent months on condition that victims are not fully identified, has drawn attention to the importance of the documents. AP researchers have seen a vast array of letters by Nazi commanders, Gestapo orders and vivid testimony from victims and observers of the brutality of camp life and the “death marches” when camps were ordered cleared of prisoners at the end of the war.”
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