THE sadism of Amon Goth has been memorably recorded in "Schindler's
List," almost fifty years after he was hanged for the atrocities that he committed
while he was the commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp, in southern Poland. But
long before Goth was portrayed as a pathological killer in Keneally's and Spielberg's
works on the Holocaust he was remembered by means of a unique and invaluable historical
monument known as the Berlin Document Center. There, in original papers maintained in a
half-inch-thick file, Goth 's role as an S.S. officer and a faithful and talented foot
soldier of the Third Reich is preserved. The dossier includes a rare photograph, in
profile, of Goth, who stood six feet four: it is a classic, brooding portrait of a
low-level hood, whose dark hair is greased back, and who is wearing a black shirt with a
bright checked tie. The file reveals the extent of his attraction to
Nazism--Viennese-born, he joined a Nazi youth group at seventeen, moved to a nationalist
paramilitary group at nineteen, and, in 1930, when he was twenty-two, joined the then
outlawed Austrian Nazi Party. He was designated No. 510,964, and in the same year he
joined the S.S. (No. 43,673).
The indisputable record of Goth's wartime assignments led to his conviction and execution
in postwar Poland. The information available in Goth's personnel file, like that of
millions of other Nazis, was captured, intact, by Allied forces at the end of the Second
World War and placed under American protection in an underground complex that had once
housed Field Marshal Hermann Goring's surveillance headquarters. The complex, in the heart
of Berlin, was rechristened the Berlin Document Center, and for the last forty-nine years
it has been controlled and administered by the United States; time and again, it has
proved its value as a critical investigative and research aid to Nazi-hunters, scholars,
historians, and governments. The B.D.C. first came to prominence in the Nuremberg trials
of 1945 through 1949; it was also called upon during the de-Nazification proceedings of
the same period; and it has provided necessary corroboration--often including artifacts
such as handwriting samples and photographs in thousands of legal cases since. Perhaps the
most celebrated part it played was in the case of Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor who
had fled to South America at the war's end. In 1985--the only time that a B.D.C. file was
ever allowed to be removed--the Mengele file was carried by courier to Brazil, and medical
information in it was used by forensic experts there to aid in positively identifying his
corpse. Earlier, when well-founded suspicions arose concerning the concealed Nazi pasts of
West Germany's President Heinrich Lubke and Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, the B.D.C.
provided conclusive proof.
The B.D.C.'s dramatic ability to unmask former Nazi participants who have gained political
and cultural power in the postwar world has made it the source of a certain amount of
criticism and a great deal of uneasiness in Germany. However, with the passage of time,
the center's strength in the investigative and prosecutorial arena is being slowly
overtaken by its importance as a historical record for scholars of the period; in fact,
with an estimated seventy-five million pages of files, it is the world's foremost
repository of primary Nazi personnel documents. With the creation of the B.D.C., captured
records were largely reorganized into biographical files, so that all a petitioner would
need to get information was a name and often a birthdate. (There are at least three Amon
Goths.) In 1993 alone, the B.D.C. carried out twenty thousand name checks at the request
of researchers. Some files would provide the person's Nazi Party and S.S. membership
numbers, the name of his or her unit, place of operations, and duties. Although access is
restricted to what the B.D.C. deems "serious researchers and scholars," the
center's directors have tended to apply that standard broadly, and, once access is
granted, no restrictions are placed on what can be studied. "It is a unique archive
that allows historians to explain the mentality of the people who played important roles
in the Third Reich," Serge Klarsfeld, the Paris-based attorney and Nazi-hunter, told
me. "For many historians, studies of the Nazi period would not have been possible
without it."
In a move that has attracted virtually no media attention in the United States or Germany,
the B.D.C. is now about to be given a new guardian. On October 18th, after decades of
argument and deliberation over who should control the B.D.C., the State Department agreed
to relinquish jurisdiction over it to the Germans this coming July. A number of factors
contributed to the decision, ranging from the political consequences of Germany's
reunification to a devastating series of thefts of B.D.C. documents in recent years, which
the Germans persuasively ascribed to American negligence. The official line on the
change-over is that the American presence is no longer needed, and also that at this
juncture a foreign power as supervisor constitutes an indignity to the German people. In
any case, as a safeguard, the agreement states that the American caretakers will depart
with a microfilm copy of the complete contents of the archives.
To many scholars familiar with the B.D.C.'s documents, the merits of the changeover are
questionable. They fear that the transfer agreement, which is three pages long, was
executed in haste and will ultimately prove to have been ill conceived, with disast rous
consequences for Nazi-hunters and historians alike.
"Why are we giving up these documents?" Elan Steinberg, the executive director
of the World Jewish Congress, said. "These documents were paid for in the most
expensive commodity of all--the blood of young American and Allied soldiers. We purchased
them. We own them. The effort by the Germans to rush through their return is clearly mixed
into the question of forgetting about the Holocaust."
"It is not enough to know, or to wish to know everything possible about the
victims," I was told by the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, who is a frequent
critic of German policies on Holocaust issues. "We must also try to know as much as
possible about the killers. The document center deals with motivation, possibilities, and
'achievement.' All available information must be insured so it will not be curtailed or
hidden in any way. That is why the documents should have remained in the hands of the
Americans."
Steinberg, Wiesel, and others are concerned that the Americans' microfilm copy of the
collection will be compromised that, on the one hand, it is being made too quickly to
maintain fundamental legibility and reliability standards and that, on the other, it will
not be immediately available after the changeover occurs. It appears that they may have
good reason to worry--potential problems have been identified, some of them having to do
with the speed at which the project is being conducted. And once the National Archives, in
Washington, receives the master copy, it will take, at a minimum, two years to complete a
users' copy for researchers.
As to the future of the originals, they are concerned that German privacy laws, which are
much stricter than American ones, could make many files simply inaccessible.
Much of, the information in Amon Goth's dossier is, as its formulators intended it to be,
"personal." As in every S.S. file, there is a Lebenslauf, or autobiographical
statement. Goth's is two pages long and, in neat handwriting, indicates that he abandoned
the teachings of the Catholic Church, risked imprisonment to join the Nazis, and fled to
Germany when he was pursued by Austrian authorities for "crimes involving
explosives." Goth wrote that his commitment to National Socialism was
"paramount." His superior officers admired his devotion, gave him glowing
personal evaluations ("He has the right attitude and shows a completely agreeable
disposition and nature"), and transferred him to the S.S. and police services
(noncommissioned posts) in 1942. The only blemishes on his record were that his racial
classification was not the highest (it was noted that he had "eastern" features)
and that he and his wife did not receive Nazi Party commendations such as were given
couples who produced a large family. Their only child, a son, was born in 1939 and died of
unexplained causes less than a year later. (A nephew, named Gerd Honsik, survives; a
virulent Austrian anti-Semite, he has been convicted of fourteen violations of Austrian
law for neo-Nazi activity, including making speeches and publishing a magazine denying the
Holocaust--crimes in Austria and Germany--and is currently a fugitive in Spain.) Goth was
a model officer, and his reward was a posting, in August, 1942, with Aktion Reinhard, the
S.S. operation to liquidate more than two million Polish Jews. He was dispatched to
Lublin, the center of the bloodbath, and his file, although it does not illuminate his
duties there, records that he emerged with a promotion and more responsibilities inside
the Waffen S.S. His posting as commandant at Plaszow was his career zenith; it is there
that "Schindler's List" observes him standing bare-chested on the balcony of his
villa, nonchalantly using the prisoners below for target practice (a penchant testified to
by numerous Plaszow survivors). The original change-of-address card noting Goth's move to
Plaszow, which was then a forced-labor camp, is also in his file.
I inspected Goth's dossier, among others, during a recent visit to then Berlin Document
Center, which is situated in the vast woods called the Grunewald, only a short subway ride
from the center of Berlin. It still has the look of a secret Nazi installation, which is
to say that the approach is entirely innocuous. Just as in the days when it was Goring's
eavesdropping headquarters, all you see at first is a quiet cul-de-sac, with a row of
whitewashed houses (which served as wartime homes for an S.S. unit) along one side and an
alpine-style house at the end. Goring outfitted the complex to house an elite,
multilingual staff, which monitored telephone calls and spied on Germans who were
considered threats to the Reich.
I was greeted at the B.D.C.'s front gate by a slender, youthful-looking forty-two-year-old
American named David Marwell, who has been at the B.D.C. since 1958, and its director
since 1989. Before that, he was chief of investigative research for the Justice
Department's Office of Special Investigations, which is better known as the American
Nazi-hunting unit. Marwell is a historian by training, and he is Jewish. "I savor the
irony that I am the custodian of these files," he told me. An armed military
policeman took my passport, and Marwell guided me through a series of locked doors. The
atmosphere inside was that of a secure military facility: surveillance cameras,
touch-sensitive and motion-detecting alarms, and original, subterranean escape hatches
that are lined now with state-of-the-art contact alarms. "The B.D.C. currently has
fifty German employees and only three Americans," Marwell said. "That is about
the same ratio that existed in the nineteen-fifties, when we had several hundred
employees."
He unlocked another door, and we entered a room that had a large metal
safe in one corner. He quickly turned the combination lock of the safe, swung the door
open, and pulled out a clear plastic folder. Inside was a slightly browned single sheet of
paper bearing a list of signatures. "This is one of the most significant pieces of
paper in the collection," he said, and he pointed to the sixth line. It was a bold
signature, simply "Hitler." "This is from a 1919 meeting of the predecessor
of the Nazi Party, the German Workers' Party--D.A.P. Hitler attended the meeting, and this
is the sign-up sheet they had at the door. That night, he gave a talk that was so
mesmerizing to those in the beer hall that it led to his eventually taking over the
Party." We proceeded into a large chamber that contained the files of the Reich's
Immigration Central Office, which provided confirmation of the Nazis' classification of
human beings into "superior" and "inferior" racial classes and also
confirmation of various attempts to "Germanize" the conquered
"inferior" eastern territories. In two adjoining rooms were the original files
of the Nazi Party Supreme Court and of the Volksgerichtshof, or People's Court, where the
Reich's laws were enforced. Another large room contained eleven million cards belonging to
perhaps seven million Nazi Party members, believed to be about ninety per cent of the
total membership. The cards were found by the United States Seventh Army, in April of
1945, at a paper mill near Munich, where they had been sent for pulping. They are still in
their original wooden file cabinets. A smaller set of cabinets in the same room contained
records of people who were barred from Party membership. Opening a drawer, I withdrew two
samples. One was the record of a young man who had been accused of masturbating at the age
of fourteen, the other that of a man who had allowed himself to be treated by a Jewish
physician.
Then I went back to the Party membership cabinets and sought out the rows for the letter
"S." Amon Goth's file was waiting for me in Marwell's office, but I wanted to
see Oskar Schindler's original Party card. Near the back of one drawer I found it---a
faded four-by-seven-inch blue card on which his date of birth, April 28, 1908, was typed.
The card revealed that Schindler had applied for Party membership on February 10, 1939
(Member No. 6,421,477), in the Sudetenland, stayed there until April, 1941, and then moved
to the Nazis' General Government in Krakow. It was there that he crossed paths with Goth.
"There are some interesting differences between the two men that you can pick up just
by looking at the dates they joined the Nazi Party," Marwell observed. "Goth was
a very early member and was affiliated with the Party when it was still illegal in
Austria. Low-number followers were inevitably the true believers; you had nothing to gain
by joining the Nazi Party when it was out of power and was deemed a fringe group. But by
the time Schindler joined the Party it was getting a lot of opportunists--it was clear
that being a Party member might boost your business or social standing. It was this fear,
that people would join for non-ideological reasons, which eventually led the Nazis to
close off membership."
We now descended into Goring's catacombs, two stories below ground level, and passed
through a massive blastproof door. Inside was a very wide central hall, nearly the length
of a football field, with three small passageways branching off from it. The walls, of
concrete, were several feet thick, and the only air was provided by small vents.
Fluorescent tubes cast a slightly greenish light on shelved stacks of files, some of them
rising as high as ten feet. Here was Goring's own file, and Mengele's, and that of
Heinrich Himmler, the head of the S.S. The breadth and magnitude of the paper stored in
this hall and the surrounding tunnels is physically overwhelming. One is quite literally
confronted with the tremendous bureaucracy that drove the Third Reich, and jarred by the
disturbing equilibrium of the records, which make no distinction between advances in
methods of extermination and ordinary, mundane tasks. Over the years, I had reviewed many
personal accounts by Nazis, such as the diary of Josef Kramer, an S.S. physician, at the
museum at Auschwitz: "SEPT. 6: Today, an excellent Sunday dinner; tomato soup, one
half of chicken with potatoes and red cabbage, and magnificent vanilla ice cream. In the
evening at 8:00 attended another special action outdoors"--927 French Jews were
selected for gassing.
Here, in stack after stack, I found the institutional corollary to accounts such as
Kramer's: Here was Himmler, in the midst of organizing the Final Solution, devoting
hundreds of hours to meticulous expense sheets. At Auschwitz, which had its own traffic
lights and regulations, the S.S. was taking Mengele to traffic court for having run his
motorcycle at a high speed into a truck. In April of 1935, about the time Joseph Goebbels
was helping to frame the Nuremberg racial laws, he was planning the seating arrangement
for his wedding; the bride was to sit next to the Fuhrer.
We walked past the files of the S.S. members, who numbered more than six hundred thousand;
of the S.A.; and the papers for the Chamber of Culture, the propaganda arm of the Reich.
Then we went back upstairs to t he Nazi membership file room, to a bank of cabinets
labeled "Chamber of Physicians." "Seeing the physicians' files reminds me
of the day you had Karl Brandt's son visit the B.D.C.," Marwell said. He was
referring to an incident that resulted from a book of interviews I had done with eleven
children of prominent Nazis. I had told all of them that their fathers' original records
were available for viewing at the B.D.C. Two--Karl Brandt, Jr., the only son of Dr. Karl
Brandt, Hitler's physician, and Niklas Frank, the younger son of Hans Frank, the
governor-general of Poland--had gone to see the files. "As coincidence would have it,
they both arrived on the same day, not knowing who the other was, although their fathers
were almost certainly acquainted," Marwell recalled. "They sat at two tables,
less than ten feet apart--the sons of two men who had been among the most powerful in the
Reich. And both of those men were hanged by the Allies. Almost fifty years later, the sons
made a pilgrimage here to learn more about their fathers. That was an unusual day."
In another underground security chamber, the largest microfilming project of its kind ever
attempted is under way. Thirteen women sit at camera stations, each routinely reaching for
a sheet of paper stacked on her right, adjusting it on a surface in front of her, waiting
for the camera's click, removing the paper to the left, and reaching for the next one. In
1968, the B.D.C. began microfilming its collection, with the notion that the United States
might at some point relinquish control to the Germans, but then halted the project in
1972. At various times, Germany cited a United States congressional provision, in effect
since the late nineteen-forties, for returning captured war records once they had been
microfilmed, and contended that a transfer was long overdue. In the end, however, Germany
prevailed not because of American policy but because of the discovery of a major internal
theft operation, whose participants were said to have stolen more than ten thousand
documents in the nineteen-eighties. (Many believe the number was as high as forty
thousand.) Marwell, who was appointed after the thefts were exposed, said that about four
thousand documents were later recovered. One B.D.C. employee , named Alfred Darko, who was
the chief of the photography unit, was convicted in the thefts and was sentenced to
twenty-eight months in jail. Three auction house owners were given probation and fined,
and seven memorabilia dealers were fined.
The disclosure of the thefts, in 1988, on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, made the
Germans' case all the stronger. To Berliners, the B.D.C. was one of the most visible
vestiges of the Allied Occupation, and after reunification its fate came to the forefront.
In 1989, the Bundestag passed a unanimous resolution requesting that the files be
transferred immediately. At that point, the State Department, represented by various
negotiators, began working in earnest with German representatives on last October's
agreement.
Critics of the agreement are dismayed that the United States was willing
to execute it while knowing that the Germans had not always honored previous agreements
concerning captured war records. When the original personnel files of the wartime German
Foreign Ministry were returned to German custody, between 1956 and 1958, it was thought
unnecessary to make copies, because the documents were subject to a treaty insuring that
Germany would grant "scholars access at all times." Yet for thirty-three
years--until 1989--the German Foreign Ministry ignored the treaty and blocked access to
the files. "It was equal-opportunity lawbreaking," according to Gerhard
Weinberg, a prominent Third Reich historian whose most recent book is "A World at
Arms: A Global History of World War II." "They didn't let anyone, including
German historians, have access." It is also well known that in the past the
Bundesarchiv--the German federal-archive system, which is headquartered in Koblenz--has
authorized the destruction of Third Reich documents. Officials have said that B.D.C.
documents will not be destroyed, but the transfer agreement provides no such guarantee.
"Archivists are the wrong people to determine if something is historically
important," I was told by Geoffrey Giles, a University of Florida history professor
and the chairman of the German Studies Association's archive committee, a watchdog group
of eminent historians. "Some of the German files that have been destroyed in the past
as useless are now considered to have been quite important."
In the eyes of Elan Steinberg, of the World Jewish Congress, the system that has been in
place at the B.D.C. since 1945 could not be improved on. "From both a scholarly and a
criminal investigative viewpoint, it was the best possible arrangement. We should have
kept the originals and given the copies to the Germans. I was actually surprised by their
insistence that they get the originals, and even more surprised by our easy acquiescence
in it. Now it appears that all our worst fears are true."
Among the "worst fears" that Steinberg refers to is the impossibility of
preserving the special characteristics of certain originals on microfilm copies. On many
Third Reich documents, the colors of handwritten jottings in the margins provide the clue
to who wrote them. (Himmler, for instance, always used a green pencil.) But colors are not
reproduced on microfilm. Another problem is that many of the early Nazi Party cards,
issued between 1925 and 1933, have dark-blue ink on a bluish background. "They are
difficult to read on the originals, and almost impossible on a copy," I was told by
William Brustein, a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, whose study of
Nazi Party demographics, made during the nineteen-eighties, was the largest research
project ever undertaken at the B.D.C. (It will be published next year, as a book called
"The Logic of Evil.") There is the further complication that some
Party-membership dossiers include six different cards; it is important to read them in the
order in which they were originally attached, but often the cards within a file have
become separated. Brustein, who worked with thousands of such cards during his multi-year
study, recalled, "Only by matching up a staple mark or seeing how a card is separated
along the edge can a researcher put the cards together in a single file. With film, you
can't see these types of physical marks, and it means you can't match them up at
all."
Other problematic documents include faint original carbons and fragile papers that were
partially burned in Nazi attempts to destroy them at the war's end. In order to meet the
July deadline the filming project has been forced to move forward at a rapid pace. With
fifty-five million originals to get through (twenty million were microfilmed in an earlier
phase of the project), the BDC's thirteen microfilmers are copying some fifty thousand
documents, in a seven-and-a-half-hour workday, which averages almost nine copies per
minute per person. The workers charged with this responsibility are not professionally
trained in the nuances of microfilming, or even in handling historical documents, nor do
they inspect the papers as they place them on the copying surface. Moreover, while the
B.D.C.'s computer program can determine that a file has been taken for microfilming, it
cannot determine whether the documents in a given file have been copied completely or
correctly. In fact, it cannot determine whether they have been copied at all.
EQUALLY worrisome to some scholars are the strict German privacy laws, which will cover
the original B.D.C. files, once they become integrated into the Bundesarchiv. A stringent
1988 law, known as the Bundesarchivgesetz, restricts access to federal archives, and
privacy considerations (legal doctrine that was first codified in 1977 as Datenschutz--and
rewritten in 1991) often mean either that records are not released or that restrictions
are applied to documents, such as the blacking out of names or other personal information.
In 1992, Germany passed a special law regarding the files of the Stasi, the internal spy
network of the former East Germany. That law abrogated many of the standard privacy
restrictions and opened the files to all victims of Stasi monitoring. Oddly however, the
German government has steadfastly refused to consider a similar access law for Nazi
documents. Even the fact of a war-crimes conviction is irrelevant under the
Bundesarchivgesetz. Access to a file is not permitted in most cases until the person in
question has been dead for thirty years, and the law empowers archivists to extend that
protection for an additional thirty years "insofar as this is in the public
interest." If the death of the person cannot be established, the file is closed for a
hundred and ten years from the person's birth. Very personal information is generally
restricted for eighty years from the date of the document's preparation. All of this means
that, except for those files pertaining to Nazis executed immediately after the war, the
original personnel files of the Third Reich could be severely restricted as of July.
German archivists have other powers, too: They can - and often do demand to know the
purpose of a document - search request before determining whether the material should be
made available. Any document can be withheld by archivists, regardless of the time
elapsed, if its use "jeopardizes" the welfare of Germany, is at odds with the
"legitimate concerns of third persons," threatens the preservation of the
original document, causes administrative work "which cannot be justified," or
impinges on any German secrecy laws. The privacy restrictions offered under the
Bundesarchivgesetz are so great that even personal portions of Mengele's file might be
sanitized.
"The restrictions in the law, coupled with the level of discretion granted to the
archivist, worries me," Michael Kater, a historian at York University, in Toronto,
who is the author of numerous works on the Third Reich, told me. He recalled a recent
incident in which he was blocked from consulting records because of a concern for the
privacy of heirs. "I was in a private German archive, and I wanted to look at letters
of a musician who was actually a victim of the Nazis and had since died," he said.
"The archivist said to me, "Well, here are the letters. We know that the person
who wrote these letters is dead, so you can see them on that count, but the person, or the
heirs of the person, to whom they were addressed also have a right. Heirs on both
sides--the heirs of the musician, and the heirs of the addressee--have privacy rights.' I
was not permitted to use these letters in my work."
"There are many recent horror stories about restrictive access to files in German
archives on an arbitrary basis," Geoffrey Giles, of the German Studies Association,
told me. "That's our great fear--that researchers won't be able to get to the
files." He added, "The Germans have never been very keen on encouraging research
on the Third Reich."
A German archivist recently provided me with an account of how one research request
involving a privacy concern was handled. A German researcher approached the Bundesarchiv
seeking information about the deceased father of two brothers, both of whom are Bundestag
legislators. Their father had been a member of the S.S. until 1936. After interviewing the
researcher, the archivist got in touch with the sons and asked if they felt comfortable
about having the information on their father released. Both said no. The archivist then
went back to the researcher and asked why he was seeking the information. The researcher
replied that he was conducting a history of one of the German political parties. The
archivist decided that the documents were unnecessary to the project and declined to
provide them.
In other recent cases involving federal and state archives, privacy
concerns have been used to prevent the publication of the last names of Jewish victims
deported from Dusseldorf; to block the access of survivors to records of Nazi persecution
of Gypsies; to curtail information in files about the Third Reich's official policy toward
alcoholics; and to prevent publication of the last names of Nazis involved in various
crimes.
I was told by Sybil Milton, the senior historian of the United States Holocaust Research
Institute, that Alfred Streim, one of Germany's leading prosecutors of Nazi crimes,
complained recently that he had received documents from the Bundesarchiv, including name
lists, which had some information and names blacked out. (Streim did not respond to my
request for an interview.)
The privacy issue also worries Nazi-hunters like Elliot Welles, the associate director for
European affairs of the Anti-Defamation League. "I am a little worried, a little
upset, and a little uneasy about how this will work, because Germans always say privacy,
privacy, privacy," he said.
The German authorities who will be responsible for the B.D.C. after it transfer discount
much of the criticism. Dr. Klaus Oldenhage, a senior Bundesarchiv official who has long
been interested in the B.D.C. files, maintains that German laws allow access to historical
information without infringing on rights of privacy. "It's not that difficult,"
he told me. "For instance, if Der Spiegel wants to do a good, general war-crimes
article, then it can have all the documents it wants. If it wants to do an article about a
particular action that took place in a single village during the war, then it can get the
information, but no names. And if all it wants to do is go out and expose someone as
having a Nazi past or a Nazi parent, then the answer is 'I'm so sorry, but no.'"
Dr. Siegfried Buttner, the vice-president of the Bundesarchiv, took the same view.
"We must be concerned about personal data, especially when it comes to celebrities,
and issues that could affect their private lives," he told me. "As for those who
were lower-ranked officers, there are sometimes private problems to address. But if the
request for documents is indispensable for scholarly research an exception can always be
made. The law provides considerable discretion in these cases."
The kind of information that might be withheld under the privacy laws has in the past
created public scandal. When a London researcher got his hands on the B.D.C.'s Nazi and
S.S. file on Baron Gunther von Reibnitz, the father of Princess Michael of Kent, the
British tabloid press had a banner week; and the same thing happened internationally when
a magazine published a copy of the Nazi Party card of Arnold Schwarzenegger's father.
However, the disinclination to open certain files could potentially impede the work of
serious investigators and Nazi-hunters. Elliot Welles, of the A.D.L., used the open-access
proviso of the B.D.C. to obtain a copy of the S.S. file on Franz Pein, who in the
nineteen-eighties was the Austrian Ambassador to Germany and then to Australia, and was
later an Austrian representative to UNESCO, in Paris. Welles's efforts eventually forced
Pein to take an early retirement, in 1988. At the Austrian mission to the United Nations,
in New York, "they kept telling me he was a 'little' Nazi," Welles said.
"There's no such thing as a little Nazi. Without this original file, you could never
prove the case against him."
In a similar instance, last year, the World Jewish Congress used B.D.C. files to prove
that Dr. Hans-Joachim Sewering, the president-elect of the World Medical Association, was
a former member of the S.S. The file on Sewering also revealed that, in 1943, when he was
a doctor at a clinic for the handicapped near Munich, he signed an order sending a
retarded girl to a euthanasia center. Sewering protested that he did not know that
euthanasia was being practiced there at that time, but he resigned under pressure.
Nazi-hunters fear that under the German privacy laws, access to both Pein's and Sewering's
B.D.C. files could have been prohibited.
THE GERMAN ARCHIVIST who will replace David Marwell and become the first
German director of the B.D.C. is Dr. Dieter Krueger, a Bundesarchiv archivist who has
overseen an important collection of Nazi personnel files in Dahlwitz-Hoppegarten. "I
am bound by the law and must protect the privacy of the person for thirty years after his
death," Krueger told me. "I will sometimes have to reject access to original
documents. I don't think you can separate access to documents from the use of access to
the documents. I believe that this law is the right approach." As to specific
examples of how he might apply privacy restrictions, "if a researcher is interested
in a serious treatment of the past, then that is fine," he said. But, he went on, his
definition of "serious" would not necessarily permit naming names. "If
someone is interested only in finding out whether a politician was a Party member, then
that is not historically useful. On the other hand, if someone signed an order to do
something, such as an execution order, that would not be protected. But if the question
involved a Volksgerichtshofcase [Nazi judicial proceeding], then I might have problems.
Maybe the person who filed the complaint was unreliable, and, if I believed that, to
release the information might affect the accused man or his family." Krueger was
adamant that he did "not want to be a bottleneck for serious research," and that
it was "not my ideal to always hold back the information." He added, however,
that any American researcher who requests access to original B.D.C. documents in the
future "must demonstrate why the microfilm is not adequate for his purposes,"
and that "if there is not a serious need for the original, then they should use the
microfilm." (Because of concerns about immediate access, Neal Sher, the former
director of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, insisted that the
transfer agreement guarantee American prosecutors the right to obtain B.D.C. originals
"expeditiously." Non-government researchers will not be accorded the same
privileges, however.)
Perhaps the most significant indicator of Germany's plans for the B.D.C. surfaced in
another conversation I had with Krueger. Almost in passing, he mentioned that the archive
would probably be reorganized -- that the new regime might do away with the system
established by the Americans and restore the filing system created by the Nazis. "You
must understand that the B.D.C. arranged its files under biographical headings, so that if
you gave a name you would get the information on that person," Krueger said.
"That is fine for investigators but not for historians. In the future, we will try to
reconstruct the links and connections between the documents. It is important that the
documents be restored to their original provenance."
As part of this reorganization, files might be dispersed to regional archives. A codicil
to the October agreement requires the Germans to consult with United States authorities
before moving the collection at the B.D.C. However, from my conversations with Krueger,
Buttner, and Oldenhage I gained the clear impression that they interpret
"consultation" as requiring Germany only to inform the United States of what it
intends to do with the documents, and that the decision is not contingent upon American
consent. "All you need to do is check the agreement," Oldenhage told me.
"It transfers 'title and control' to the Federal Republic of Germany."
Krueger acknowledged that restoring the files to their original order was an enormous
undertaking and could take five to ten years. (Historians, Michael Kater said, are
concerned that "it provides the authorities with another pretext for saying, 'I'm
sorry, but this material is not available for researchers.' ") Buttner said that no
final decision on the reorganization had been made. Oldenhage told me that he thought the
reorganization would take place, and he went on to say that eventually the B.D.C. facility
itself might be closed, "although not in the near future, in part because of the
sensitivity of this issue to the Americans."
THERE WAS a flurry of activity at the eleventh hour surrounding the B.D.C. transfer
agreement. Richard Holbrooke, the United States Ambassador to Germany, told me that he had
first learned of the pending agreement soon after he assumed his post in late September
and that he'd had second thoughts about it. He placed the agreement on hold shortly before
it was to be executed, and sought the opinions of several historians and prominent Jewish
leaders, including Michael Berenbaum, the director of the United States Holocaust Research
Institute, a division of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Berenbaum checked
around and responded to the Ambassador that the transfer seemed sound. Recently, Holbrooke
had his staff investigate some of the concerns raised since then, including the fact that
no provision was made to guarantee access to the original documents while the National
Archives labors to make a users' set of the microfilm. Holbrooke's policy adviser, Dan
Hamilton, said last week that, after reviewing the matter, "there are, as far as I
can tell, no major problems here."
It appears that the National Archives may make the users' microfilm available in stages,
as it is copied. But Berenbaum, who told me that he had never seen a draft of the transfer
agreement, said last week that until all copies are available in Washington the originals
should remain accessible, according to the traditional B.D.C. rules. "It would be a
shame to lose access to material, especially when scholarship is burgeoning," he
said.
Brewster Chamberlin, the director of archives at the Holocaust Research
Institute, who was one of those whose counsel Berenbaum had sought before responding to
Holbrooke, said that at the time, "as long as we had the copies fully accessible in
Washington I didn't foresee a problem." Knowing now that a complete users' copy is
several years away, Chamberlin concurs that "it would have been better to wait until
the film was ready before giving the documents back."
An American source familiar with the B.D.C. negotiations told me that the timing of the
turnover had been hotly contested, and that the State Department negotiators had in fact
wanted to maintain custody until a users' set was available. The Germans balked, however,
because Washington could not tell them precisely how long it would take to make such a
copy, and the Americans backed down. Fritz Stern, a Columbia University history professor,
who was in Bonn last fall as senior adviser to the embassy, told me, "We soon
realized that it was impossible to reopen negotiations that had been going on for a very
long time."
Some scholars and activists claim, however, that they raised concerns when there was still
time to influence the outcome, and were ignored. "We at the World Jewish Congress had
publicly complained since 1990 about the potential problems with this transfer, and no one
in the State Department ever paid us any heed," Elan Steinberg told me. "We
arranged for a senior-level delegation, headed by the president, Edgar Bronfman, to visit
the B.D.C. We called a press conference to alert the general public to this issue. After
that, no responsible official could claim he didn't know about our concern."
WHEN I RETURNED from Berlin, I met with Elliot Welles, of the A.D.L, in his New York
office, overlooking the United Nations. He talked about several cases that he was still
pursuing, with the help of the B.D.C. files, including one that concerned a man still
living in Europe--a former S.S. officer who had selected Welles's mother for execution in
the Riga ghetto. "I was fourteen when they killed her. I lost every family member I
had in the war," he said. He stopped for a moment, bit his lip, and looked out the
office window. Then, seemingly talking more to himself than to me, he said, "We
should have kept the B.D.C. We should have insisted that it be open always, for anyone who
wanted to go there."
"The hunt for Nazi criminals is biologically finishing," Simon Wiesenthal, the
world's preeminent Nazi-hunter, said. "The survivors are dying. The murderers are
dying. There are only a few years left for justice here, and why is it now that the center
is returned? Germany feels strong and wants it back? That's not enough.
"The document center is very important because if you are looking up whether somebody
is a Nazi, you can see the whole development of that man, what he says in his own words in
his autobiography-those papers simply don't allow people to lie in later years. Those
documents are a holy matter."
Copyright 1994, Gerald Posner
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