Holocaust Records Opened After More Than 60 Years

Hitler's secret archives are now being opened after more than 60 years. For the first time, the secrets of the Nazi Holocaust are being made available to the public. The number of documents is shocking, some 50 million pages contained within thousands of filing cabinets.

In the spring of 1945, Germany fell and the Allies raided concentration camps to free those left behind collected all the documentation they could find. The documents were taken to Bad Arolsen, a town in the middle of Germany, where they were sorted, filed and locked away. Recently these files have been opened and made available to the public. The storerooms consisted of 16 miles of shelving that held the stories of 17 million victims.

The stories detailed not only those of the Jews but also slave laborers, political prisoners and homosexuals. To reopen these files is like opening a time vault and letting the past seep out. The files contained Gestapo arrest warrants and jewelry lost like freedom.

The chief archivist, Udo Jost maintains the factory and keeps the records organized. Contained with in the millions of files is a list of 1000 prisoners who were saved by a factory owner who told the Nazis he needed the prisoners for labor. This list contained 700 men and 300 women and is better known as Schindler's list. Also contained within is the file of a young girl and her paper trail from Amsterdam to Bergen-Belsen where she died at age 15. This girl was best known as Anne Frank.

In notebooks labeled "Totenbuch" or "death books" you can read the names of millions of victims who were killed in the concentration camps. The names of those executed in the gas chambers in places like Auschwitz were not recorded. The Nazis meticulous records included the names, numbers and amount of lice found for each prisoner. The Nazis did not want disease manifesting in the camps and documented the number and size of head lice found on each person.

April 20^th was an extremely deadly day in one of the camps; a prisoner was shot every two minutes for an hour and a half. This was a Hitler's birthday and the executions his gift.

The Red Cross International Tracing Service set up the archives after the war to trace lost family members. There was a backlog of 400,000 unanswered letters requesting information about their family. Last spring, after 11 countries agreed, the archive was opened.

60 minutes recently took three Holocaust survivors to the archive. Walter Feiden, Miki Schwartz and Jack Rosenthol became the first survivors ever in the archive.

Miki Schwartz was 14 and watched his parents sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz and then unwillingly signed himself in at Buchenwald. Feiden had been on the list to Dora, an arms fabrication plant, and had unbeknownst to him, escaped death. Hardly anyone sent to Dora came back alive and for some unknown reason, his name had been removed from the transport list. Walter Feiden was 13 and was in a nazi ghetto where both his parents died before signing into Buchenwald. Jack Rosenthal arrived at Auschwitz with his family. Immediately upon his arrival, his uncle and himself were sent to the barracks while his mother and five siblings were sent straight to the gas chambers and ovens. Jack was liberated by American soldiers in 1945 and still bears the tattoo of his inmate number.

The archive at Bad Arolsen is being digitally scanned so that it can be distributed to research centers. Many survivors will soon be able to access a part of there past either unknown to them or blocked out. These records may stir up old memories for the survivors but will serve as a reminder of the horrors against mankind to all today.