War crimes files revealing early evidence of Holocaust death camps that was smuggled out of eastern Europe are among tens of thousands of files to be made public for the first time this week.
The once-inaccessible archive of the UN War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), dating back to 1943, is being opened by the Wiener Library in London, with a catalogue that can be searched online.
The files establish that some of the first demands for justice came from countries that had been invaded, such as Poland and China, rather than Britain, the US and Russia, which eventually coordinated the post-war Nuremberg trials .
The archive, along with the UNWCC, was closed in the late 1940s as West Germany was transformed into a pivotal ally at the start of the Cold War and use of the records was effectively suppressed.
Around the same time, many convicted Nazis were granted early release after the anti-communist US senator Joseph McCarthy lobbied to end war crimes trials.
Access to the vast quantity of evidence and indictments was timed to coincide with the publication yesterday of Human Rights After Hitler: The Lost History of Prosecuting Axis War Crimes by Dan Plesch, a researcher who has been working on the documents for a decade.
The documents record the gathering of evidence shortly after the UN was founded in January 1942.
They demonstrate that rape and forced prostitution were being prosecuted as war crimes in tribunals as far apart as Greece, the Philippines and Poland in the late 1940s, despite more recent suggestions that this was a legal innovation following the 1990s Bosnian conflict.
The files show the Polish government in exile supplied extraordinarily detailed descriptions of concentration camps such as Treblinka and Auschwitz, where millions of Jews were gassed.
The accounts had been smuggled out of occupied eastern Europe.
A charge sheet from April 1944 mention victims being forced to strip off clothing and how “the terracotta floors in the chambers became very slippery when wet.”
The Wiener Library was founded in Amsterdam in 1934 by Alfred Wiener to monitor Nazi anti-semitism.
He shipped his collection to London on the eve of World War II, then worked with the British government to inform officials about Adolf Hitler’s regime and provide evidence for the Nuremberg trials.
Now based in Bloomsbury, central London, the library supports study of the Holocaust and genocide. It also works with the International Tracing Service to provide free help to those searching for relatives who vanished into the camps.
“The UN War Crimes Commission catalogue, which can be searched online, will be available through our Web site this week,” the library’s archivist, Howard Falksohn, said. “People will then be able to come in and look through the archive itself.”
“We anticipate a lot of interest. Some of the PDF files [onto which the 900GB UN archive has been copied] each contain more than 2,000 pages. This is the first time they will be available to anyone in the UK. It may well be that people will be able to rewrite crucial chapters of history using the new evidence,” he said.
Plesch, who is the director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS in the University of London, had to get special permission to read the documents, which were closely guarded by the UN in New York.
Only researchers who received authority from their government and consent from the UN secretary-general were allowed to read them, and they were not allowed to take notes or copies.
Plesch helped persuade diplomats, including then-US ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, to release the secret material.
“This is a huge resource for combating Holocaust denial,” Plesch said. “The German national authorities were never given access to the archive by the allies after the war. All of this has never seen the light of day.”
Some of the earliest files of evidence were collected to indict Hitler directly for his role in the coordinating and controlling massacres carried out by Nazi units in Czechoslovakia.
Much of the evidence was collected by the Czech government in exile. There are more than 300 pages detailing Hitler’s orders and responsibilities. The Nazi leader was eventually indicted in secret by a meeting of the UNWCC in late 1944 as Luftwaffe bombs fell on London.
One affidavit in the files is from a British soldier, Harry Ogden, who was captured at Narvik, Norway, in 1940, escaped from a prisoner of war camp to join Polish partisans and was re-imprisoned in another camp alongside Auschwitz.
By the late 1940s, the US and British governments were winding down prosecutions of Nazis.
Then-US president Harry Truman made anti-communism, rather than holding Nazis to account, a priority, Plesch said.
“Even action against the perpetrators of the massacre of British RAF officers attempting to escape from prison camp Stalag Luft III, a flight made iconic by films ... was curtailed,” he said.
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was