Nazi files on display at Holocaust museum

Bridget Sisk, chief of Archives and Records Management Section at the United Nations, views a 1947 film negative during a special tour of the UN's historical archives. Bebeto Matthews / AP

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And Elimar Luder Precht, who served as chief dentist at several concentration camps, was accused of selecting Auschwitz inmates for execution based on whether they had gold or platinum teeth that could be forcibly taken.

The vast collection includes about 500,000 digitized microfilm images with more than 10,000 case files in multiple languages from Europe and Asia on people identified as war criminals.There are also meeting minutes, trial transcripts and 37,000 names listed in a central registry of war criminals and suspects.Some files have lists of personnel at concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Ravensbruck.

The evidence was submitted by 17 member nations for evaluation to try to assure that war criminals would be arrested and tried, but the war crimes commission was shut down in 1948.

Paul Shapiro, director of the museum's Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, notes that Cold War politics prevented many war crimes suspects from being prosecuted.

"Most Holocaust perpetrators were never held accountable before the law, "he says." Many of them were recruited by various governments for work during the Cold War. I don't want to say only by Western governments, because Soviets also recruited scientists and others."'

Making the records public fosters a degree of belated accountability, he says.