Himmler tried to get rid of the human evidence
BAD AROLSEN, Germany -- World War II is near its end. The Nazi empire is crumbling from its edges inward as Soviet and Allied forces advance. Millions of Jews, Gypsies and political enemies of the Third Reich have already been exterminated. Hundreds of thousands are still in death camps praying for rescue.
Then, in one final sadistic spasm, the Germans set out to empty camps and move their inmates to the German heartland on what the prisoners, and later historians, call the death marches.
"A handover is out of the question. The camp must be evacuated immediately. No prisoner must be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy alive," says a handwritten note on plain paper, apparently referring to Dachau. It is signed by the Gestapo chief, Heinrich Himmler, and dated April 14, 1945.
After the war a copy of Himmler's extraordinary order was delivered from the Dachau concentration camp archive to the International Tracing Service, or ITS, a unit of the International Committee of the Red Cross that manages a vast repository of wartime and postwar German records in the small resort town of Bad Arolsen.
Now this storehouse of Nazi papers, sealed from public view for 60 years, is the focus of intense diplomacy among the 11 nations governing the Tracing Service as they meet this week in The Hague to discuss how to open them to researchers. The Associated Press has been given access on condition that victims are not fully identified...
Read entire article at AP
Then, in one final sadistic spasm, the Germans set out to empty camps and move their inmates to the German heartland on what the prisoners, and later historians, call the death marches.
"A handover is out of the question. The camp must be evacuated immediately. No prisoner must be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy alive," says a handwritten note on plain paper, apparently referring to Dachau. It is signed by the Gestapo chief, Heinrich Himmler, and dated April 14, 1945.
After the war a copy of Himmler's extraordinary order was delivered from the Dachau concentration camp archive to the International Tracing Service, or ITS, a unit of the International Committee of the Red Cross that manages a vast repository of wartime and postwar German records in the small resort town of Bad Arolsen.
Now this storehouse of Nazi papers, sealed from public view for 60 years, is the focus of intense diplomacy among the 11 nations governing the Tracing Service as they meet this week in The Hague to discuss how to open them to researchers. The Associated Press has been given access on condition that victims are not fully identified...