I thought this was an odd twist to the story about the International Tracing Service (ITS):

This vast archive — 16 miles of files in six nondescript buildings in a German spa town — contains the fullest records of Nazi persecutions in existence. But because of concerns about the victims’ privacy, the ITS has kept the files closed to the public for half a century, doling out information in minimal amounts to survivors or their descendants on a strict need-to-know basis.

This policy, which has generated much ill-feeling among Holocaust survivors and researchers, is about to change.

In May, after years of pressure from the United States and survivors’ groups, the 11 countries overseeing the archive agreed to unseal the files for scholars as well as victims and their families.

Were there victims who wanted the archive to remain closed? It seems more plausable to me that the identities being protected were actually of the perpetrators. It is an archive of accountability.

“If you sat here for a day and read these files, you’d get a picture of what it was really like in the camps, how people were treated. Look — names and names of kapos, guards — the little perpetrators,” [Paul Shapiro, of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington] said.

[…]

Mandated to trace missing persons and help families reunite, ITS has allowed few people through its doors, and has responded to requests for information on wartime victims with minimal data, even when its files could have told more.

Shocking to think how useful this information would be to undo the dislocation and destruction to families, and yet it was kept secret under the pretense of helping victims. Odd, no? Also shocking to see just how widespread the systems were, and thus how many people would have been impacted had the documents been released earlier:

Postwar historians estimated about 5,000 to 7,000 detention sites. But after the Cold War ended, records began pouring out of the former communist nations of East Europe. More sites were disclosed in the last six years in claims by 1.6 million people for slave labor reparations from a $6.6 billion fund financed by the German government and some 3,000 industries.

“We have identified somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 camps and ghettos of various categories,” said Geoffrey Megargee of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, who is compiling a seven-volume encyclopedia of these detention centers.