"Massacres, murders and torture"

[Jazzy]

From Adolf Hitler down to the petty bureaucrats who staffed the Nazi death camps, thousands of perpetrators of World War II war crimes were eventually written up in vast reams of investigative files - files that now, for the first time, can be viewed in their entirety by the public.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington has obtained a full copy of the U.N. War Crimes Commission archive that has largely been locked away for the past 70 years under restricted access at the United Nations. On Thursday, the museum will announce it has made the entire digital archive freely available to visitors in its research room.

Although information in the documents has long been known to investigators and historians, the public was kept out. Even researchers at the U.N. must petition for access through their governments.

Many of those named in the archive were never held accountable.

In addition to the allegations of mass murder against Hitler and his high-level henchmen, the files list thousands of obscure but no less horrendous cases from across Europe and Asia.

The vast collection includes about 500,000 digitized microfilm images with more than 10,000 case files in multiple languages from Europe and Asia on people identified as war criminals. There are also meeting minutes, trial transcripts and 37,000 names listed in a central registry of war criminals and suspects. Some files have lists of personnel at concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Ravensbruck.

Some case files are brief, while others are more extensive collections of charging documents, witness statements, correspondence and commission reports. The evidence was submitted by 17 member nations for evaluation to try to assure that war criminals would be arrested and tried, but the war crimes commission was shut down in 1948.

Paul Shapiro, director of the museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, noted that Cold War politics prevented many war crimes suspects from being prosecuted.

"Most Holocaust perpetrators were never held accountable before the law," he said. "Many of them were recruited by various governments for work during the Cold War. I don't want to say only by Western governments, because Soviets also recruited scientists and others."

He said making the records public fosters a degree of belated accountability.

Full article

If given the opportunity, would you view the U.N. War Crimes Commission archive?

 

[Nebulous]

Interesting, I suppose I would be curious to see what went on back then. Crime wise.