The Nazi papers

After years of pressure from the Western world, Germany has announced that it will finally tear open it's ugliest scar.

Soon 50 million documents from the Nazi empire will be made public.

Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries made the announcement Tuesday, pledging Germany's support for the measure at the meeting mext month of the International Tracing Service, which handles administration of the archives.

The "Holocaust Archives" have been hidden away in a former SS barracks in the north-central German town of Bad Arolsen for more than 60 years. The mountain of paperwork holds the gruesome details of the fates of more than 17 million people who suffered the horrors of the concentration camps.

The Nazis kept meticulous records of the atrocities they committed against humanity. All stacked together, they would reach over 10 miles high.

British historian Frederick Taylor hopes this will help silence those who still refuse to acknowledge history.

This will "act to the disadvantage of the deniers, who treat the Holocaust as if it were a vast, undocumented fantasy created after 1945," Taylor wrote in an e-mail to SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Eleven nations -- Germany, the US, Italy, Poland, France, Belgium, Britain, Greece, Israel, Luxembourg and the Netherlands -- have been meeting for years to deal with the administration of the archives. The group agreed in principle to make public the records in 1998, but Germany has been stalling ever since. Any actions taken must be approved by unanimous consent.

Up to now the files have been made available by through the International Tracing Service, an arm of Red Cross, for people trying to track down the fates of relatives. They handle about 150,000 requests annually.

We can only hope the current U.S. adminstration keeps such detailed records once their camps are up and running.