GLR Forum
General Forum => GLBT General Topics => Topic started by: Feral on Mon, May 15, 2006, 11:06
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Planet Out (http://www.planetout.com/news/article.html?2006/05/14/3)
Tucked away among millions of files stood a cabinet with the records of Amsterdam's wartime Jewish Council, the channel used by Nazi occupiers to convey anti-Semitic edicts in Holland.
But the cabinet was off limits... just as all the contents of the archive in the German village of Bad Arolsen have been denied to academics.
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For 60 years, the storehouse... has been used almost exclusively to trace Holocaust survivors or track the fate of victims for their families.
The custodians also felt obliged to protect histories that the victims may have wanted kept secret: arrests on charges of "anti-social behavior" or homosexuality, hereditary diseases, pseudo-medical experiments or forced sex that resulted in children.
But on Tuesday, the 11-nation governing body of the International Tracing Service, a Red Cross body that oversees the archive, will meet in Luxembourg to discuss amending a 1955 treaty that has locked away the labyrinth of files since World War II.
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Much of the information on Jewish victims in Bad Arolsen already is duplicated... [elsewhere.]
But Jews were only half of the 12 million people exterminated by the Nazi death machine, and the files held by the International Tracing Service have far more comprehensive accounts of Nazi operations.
There are files on some 17.5 million people in all, and the index cards listing the archive's contents fill three rooms.
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It will certainly take some time, untill all the records are evaluated and the total number of gay and lesbian victims will become known. Additionally, we must assume that many LGBT victims were arrested and murdered for being Jewish or communists.