| Title: | BAGELS and other things of Jewish interest |
| Notice: | 1.0 policy, 280.0 directory, 32.0 registration |
| Moderator: | SMURF::FENSTER |
| Created: | Mon Feb 03 1986 |
| Last Modified: | Thu Jun 05 1997 |
| Last Successful Update: | Fri Jun 06 1997 |
| Number of topics: | 1524 |
| Total number of notes: | 18709 |
The following note appeared recently in the Genealogy Notesfile. Does
anyone know why the American authorities kept these lists hidden and
under wraps for nearly *FIFTY YEARS*???!!!
I have been trying desparately for some years now, and my mother has been
searching since the end of WWII for some scrap of information on what was
the fate of her parents Herman and Alma Zernik and brother Bernard and sister
Edith.
Jonathan Wreschner
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Note 809.3 Jewish Genealogy 3 of 3
JOHNC1::AHERN "Dennis the Menace" 15 lines 12-FEB-1992 22:05
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According to an article on page 3 of today's Boston Globe, the American
Red Cross is cataloging the names of concentration camp victims from
captured original Nazi records in the National Archives. The documents
being researched include transport lists, death lists, lists of
victims of medical experiments, and forced labor and concentration camp
records primarily from Auschwitz, Buchenwald and smaller camps that
were liberated by Allied forces.
Yesterday they released the first microfilms containing 7,000 names to
be cross referenced. Eventually they expect to have vital information
on 300,000 to 500,000 names.
It was also mentioned that the Red Cross also has 46 million records on
13 million people, presumably military and refugees from WWII.
| T.R | Title | User | Personal Name | Date | Lines |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1185.1 | sympathies | MEMIT::KIS | Wed Mar 18 1992 00:16 | 20 | |
Sorry, it must be just awful not to know anything about what
happpened to one's familly! deep sympathies to your mother.
I guess my father was "lucky" to have been approached by a
photographer (in the early 40s in Palestine), who tried to
sell him photos of his parents boarding the train to auwswitz..
as he put it: Dressed in their 'Sunday' best thinking they
were being taken to safety.
As for the 300,000 to 500,000 perished listed in those files...
these numbers make me a bit uncomfortable; Because when I joined
Digital 12 years ago, I worked with a Holocaust revisionist who
believed that the Jewish people exagerated their losses. His
opinion was that only about 400,000 jews died.
dk
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| 1185.2 | I think it's standard operating procedure | MINAR::BISHOP | Thu Mar 19 1992 18:12 | 23 | |
re .0, "Why hidden for fifty years?"
It might not be malicious: it's a routine practice of the US
government not to release any records it owns which contain
personal or private information until a substantial amount of
time has passed since the record was collected. I believe fifty
years is a standard amount of time for this--in that case, this
has been released early!
The same delay is standard for military secrets: things get
automatically down-graded after fifty years, so that historians
get a chance to see the real treaties and real records of battles
and so on (there's also a process for preventing down-grading
if the secrets are still "hot"--we don't for example know the
exact way the first two atom bombs were built).
That's one of the reasons there's a mini-boom in WWII books: the
1939..42 files have been opened now in both the US and Britain.
You can argue that a compassionate exception should have been
made for purposes of family re-union.
-John Bishop
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