A classified archive of the UN Commission on War Crimes opened in London. We are talking about tens of thousands of documents detailing the death camp system. Many papers were used in the preparation of the Nuremberg Trials. But with the onset of the Cold War, the archive was closed, and hundreds of criminals escaped punishment. Now these materials are freely available, and force a new look at the role of the United States and Britain in the rehabilitation of the Nazis.
The classified archives of the UN Commission on the Investigation of War Crimes are 516 boxes of documents. After they were scanned, everything fit on a small disc and is now available electronically to visitors at the Wiener Library in London. It is the world's most famous archive of information about the Holocaust. Among the documents released today is the first charge brought against Adolf Hitler in absentia. Back in December 1944, the Czech government in exile demanded a trial against him.
“Hitler was then the leader of the country - Nazi Germany. And for the first time in history, an incumbent head of state was charged with committing war crimes,”underlines the director of the Viner Library Ben Barkow.
This archive contains a detailed description of atrocities in the death camps, testimonies of former prisoners and prisoners of war, interrogation protocols. Allies in the anti-Hitler coalition have been collecting this evidence since 1943. Based on them, 8 thousand charges were brought. But only 2 thousand made it to court.
In 1948, the work of the commission ceased altogether. The United States and Great Britain were not interested in being overzealous in investigating the crimes of the Nazis, because it was decided to use some of them to build West Germany.
“I think that many accents can be illuminated in a different way - in particular, about the cooperation of the elites of Great Britain and the United States with Nazi Germany,” emphasizes Aleksey Podberezkin, director of the Center for Military-Political Studies.
Washington's patronage has enabled many criminals to escape trial. Among them - the former accountant of Auschwitz, SS man Oskar Gröning, who lived in peace, receiving a pension of three thousand euros. And only in 2016 was he still convicted of crimes committed more than seventy years ago.
“They talked about this trial as the last opportunity to punish this Nazi criminal in Germany. But in fact, the accusation against Groening was drawn up by a UN commission many decades ago,”underlines the director of the Viner Library, Ben Barkow.
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After the dissolution of the commission for the investigation of war crimes, its archive was classified. To access it, the researchers had to provide an official letter from their government and obtain the consent of the UN Secretary General.
“And even if you got there, the archives didn’t really want to show you everything,” says Ben Barkow. "They said that it was forbidden to copy anything here, you couldn't even make notes."
The Cold War turned a lot into a bargaining chip. In the wake of anti-communism in the United States, under pressure from Senator Joseph McCarthy, even those condemned by the international Nuremberg Tribunal were released ahead of schedule.
The fact that the archive of documents on Nazi crimes has been classified for decades speaks of a cynical attitude towards the lessons of World War II.
And the fact that now this evidence is finally revealed - albeit belated, but still, the right step.