Holocaust Museum helping survivors and families navigate Nazi archive

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is offering to help survivors and their families navigate a vast Nazi archive that promises to document their persecution and provide clues to the fate of loved ones.

After months of work on more than 100 million digital images from the International Tracing Service archive in Bad Arolsen, Germany, the museum announced that it would begin answering requests from survivors and their families.

'This moment is a wonderful victory for survivors, although long overdue,' museum director Sara J. Bloomfield said Thursday in a statement. 'But the significance of ITS extends far beyond the survivor generation. With an increase in Holocaust denial and minimization, the evidence in this massive archive will serve as an authentic witness to the scope of the crimes of the Holocaust for many generations to come.'

In August, the ITS began transferring the documents to the Washington museum and two others _ Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem's outskirts, and the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw, Poland. The International Committee of the Red Cross administers the ITS archive.

The Washington museum will be the first of the three museums to begin answering large numbers of requests that researchers hope will help survivors and their families get long-sought answers to bitter questions. They believe even small details could prove invaluable to aging survivors.