Secrets of the Nazi Archives
“ To work in the Himmler files for a year teas like locking oneself up in a combined insane asylum and lorlure chamber.”So said one of the many historians who hare helped to study, classify, and make public “virtually the entire archives” of the Third Reich. Mr. halm, a native New Yorker and graduate of Bucknell University, became interested in the Nazi documents when he teas writing THE CODEBREAKERS, which teas published in 1967. He is now at work on a book about German military intelligence.
Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away
OZYMANDIAS by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817)
by David Kahn
AN ARMS truck backed up to a former torpedo factor in Alexandria, Virginia, on January 23, 1968, and two large wooden crates were loaded onto it. When the truck pulled away, the biggest project in the history of history reached a final milestone. I he crates held the last of the German records seized in World War II that were being restituted alter microfilming for publication.
Never before had virtually the entire archives of a nation been captured, removed, and made public. It was like seeing a person suddenly stripped of his clothes, like hearing everything he had said to his wife, his friends, and his psychiatrist. For exposed to the gaze of scholars were nearly all the surviving documents ol the German Foreign Office, the Oberkommando dcr Wehrmacht, army units, the S.S., the Nazi Party, private firms like I. G. Farben, cultural organizations, university fraternities, and virtually every government ministry of Nazi Germany.
The disclosures have already changed accepted views of history. A major case in point involves high German policy in World War I. Historians had generally agreed with studies, based on the then available evidence, that German policies aiming at European hegemony and world power were held only by military and right-wing fanatics. But the opening of the German archives after World War II permitted Fritz Fischer, professor ol history at Hamburg University, to make an exhaustive: examination of all pertinent documents for the first time. In his Germany’s Aims in the Hirst World War, Fischer demonstrates that world power was a policy of the entire German government, civilians included, supported by almost everyone who counted, and that Germany’s war guilt cannot be fobbed off on the Supreme Command and the kaiser. Historians widely regard Fischers basic thesis as proved, mainly owing to the unimpeachable nature of his sources.
The story ol this enormous documentary windfall for historians, one ot the most exciting events in historiography, begins with the Inst Allied soldier who picked up a German document from the battlefield. Frequently, such documents had great intelligence value. When the British captured records of an Afrika korps radio-monitoring company during a flurry of action in July, 1942, they learned that the Germans had been obtaining considerable data from the British radio traffics The British instituted new signal and cipher procedures that denied this information to the Germans and were able to build up for 11 Mamein in secrecy.
As the Allied bombing of Germany increased in intensity, German archivists began to disperse their papers. Starting in July. 1943. many German Foreign Office files went from Berlin to krummhhhel, a resort in southeastern Germany, and to various castles south and east of Berlin. The highly confidential files of the foreign minister’s secretariat were microfilmed for protection, while Joachim von Ribbcntrop installed himself, his stall, and the original papers in an armored train in which he followed Hitler about. Many military records were likewise moved out of the llecresarchiv (army archives) in Potsdam. Those that stayed sometimes suffered severe destruction. I tins a historian who today asks the German archivists for information on Prussian Army officers of the 1800s will receive a rather bitter note reporting that the records fell within the competence of the Heeresarchiv but that they were apparently destroyed in an air raid.
JUST before the final collapse, orders went out from Berlin to destroy the records. But orders from Berlin had by then lost much of their force, and the archivists were in addition reluctant to hunt the files that they had built up over so many years. The custodians of the evacuated naval records could not do so in any case: the elderly admirals had used up the logs and gasoline intended for the archival bonfire to keep themselves warm in the chilly rooms ol Tambach Castle. Consequently cache after cache fell into the hands of the racing Allied forces. The U.S. 7th Army seized the Nazi Party membership card file at a paper mill outside Munich. The S.S. records were found in a cave near Pottenstein in Bavaria. Many of the 1000 finds were recognized and exploited by documents teams, often led by trained archivists. Military government officials had organized these to obtain the civil authority files that they would need to control occupied areas effectively.
Following the surrender, the thousands of tons of documents were assembled at collection points. Here archivists and lawsers combed through them for material that would seise as incriminatory evidence in the forthcoming Nuremberg trials. They eliminated earls the possibility that the files had been deliberated lelt in the path ot the Allies with spurious documents planted to sow discord. The seekers enjoyed at least one major stroke of luck. Rihhentiop’s armored train had been destroyed, and with it its files, and the Mlies despaired of ever recovering these most impoitaut documents of the Foreign Office, But in 1945, kail von kocscli, a minor official of the Foreign Office who had been in charge of one of the dispersal points and who had secreth buried the ministers microfilmed files, met quite In chance the chiel of the British documents team. He disclosed the existence ol the mic 10film. which had been unknown to the Allies, and led the team to its hiding place. Among the 10,000 microfilmed pages were such items is the correspondence between Hitler and other heads of state, including most of the Hitler Mussolini conespcmelence, and the notes of Hitler’s chief interpreter on his and Ribhentrop’s conversations with foreign statesmen. The Loesch films today constitute one of the prime sources of material on the high direction of German foreign policy during the Nazi period.
A selection of documents from all sources -concentration camp records, telephone conversations transcribed by Hermann Göring’s wiretapping “Research Office.”Hitler memoranda-were printed in the forty-two volume record of the Nuremberg trials; they serve as a prime source for the hisiory of the Nazi terror. But left untouched were 99 percent of the documents. Fhese now divided into two majoi groups the archives of the Foreign Office on the one hand, and all the rest of ilucaptured documents, largely military, ministerial, and party, on the other,
In June of 1946, United States and Great Britain agreed to publish jointly the most important Foreign Office papers. They felt that Germany was responsible lot World War II and that the documents would establish that. Now the publication of diplomatic documents for polemic pm poses stood in an old tradition. Nations had long issued such repetories to justify their conduct during crises; the oldest of these “colored books,” the series of British Blue Books, reaches back to the late tfioos. All these collections exclude emliait assing doc uments. Even the most scliolaily, Germany’s lotty-volume Dir Grosse Politik der Eurnpaist hrn Aabuirttr, 18711914, which sought to undermine the moral base of the Versailles treaty by showing that all the nations had blundered into the war, succumbed to this practice.
The Allied publication was to differ from all previous ones in three respects: (a) it would be published In foreign powers, (b) no documents would be omitted ten political reasons, since the editorial work was to he peiiotmed strictly “on the basis of the highest scholarly objectivity, and (c) it would be done on a cooperative international basis. France adhered to the agreement in 1947.
The Foreign Office files, which had been moved to Berlin, were itown to England during the Berlin crisis ot 1948. They were assembled at Whaddon Hall, “the only really ugly t.eorgian country house,”on an estate sixty miles north of London. There a tripartite team began examining the ;}oo tons ot documents coveting 1918 to n)|.V
Each of the nine scholars usually there three from each country had been assigned a topic lot the period for which volumes were being prepared. The editor first read through the appropriate files, which came in the form of original telegrams, memoranda, reports, and other documents stitched with cardboard covets into folders about an inch thick.
These files were not a single coherent unit. They represented the working liles ol officials ami were arranged sometimes chronologically, sometimes topically, sometimes alphabetically. “ There is no place where, lor instance, all the telegrams from the 1 mbassy in London may be found,”wrote an editor. “Ten or twenty copies of one telegram may be found in various files; the only surviving copy of another telegram may be found in the file of another mission abroad to which it was sent for information.”Often no copy could be lound because of destruction or Soviet confiscation. After 1943 the material is fragmentary.
The editor made out a 3 by 5 card for each candidate for inclusion in the printed volume, and then sent the files to he microfilmed, he did not order every single item filmed: the innumerable carbon copies were not, nor were League of Nations reports, pamphlets, routine administrative papers. But most items were photocopied fat more than would ever be printed. This recording of all the relevant documents served as a cheek upon the editors and as a protection against future burial of embarrassments by too patriotic German archivists; Allied scholars had already found in these very files notes ordering archivists to remove certain items before giving a dossier to a visiting historian.
Upon the return of the files, the editot chose the documents to he printed. Then the entire file was reviewed by an editor from anothei country, to rule out national bias. Any differences-and these were rare—were resolved by the editors in chief. Translating the convoluted Nazi jargon created its own brand of difficulty, but the first fat tome of Docunienh on German Foreign Polity, 1918-1945 appeared in 1949.
At first. DGFP was planned to be published within ten years in twenty volumes. But the quantity ami the cpiality of the documents soon overwhelmed this modest appraisal. The period front Hitler’s accession in 1933 to the German declaration of war on the United States in tpjt alone runs nineteen volumes Subsequent volumes, cover mg the test ol the w.u and the years 1918 to 1933 will he published in German by West Germany, which It assumed this task altei the arc hive s were returned to Bonn in 1958. German editors now partic ipate in the work.
The set it s has fulfilled its unique promise not to supperess material for pohlh.il reasons, l he histori ans have sometimes had to fight lot this freedom, but. wrote lormei editor in ehiel Raymond J. Son tag, “In lhe end, it the editors said .1 document was needed, it was primed.”A case in point is the publication of the reports, highly embarrassing to the British royal family, detailing German attempts to exploit what they considered the pro-Httlet attitude ol the Duke ol Windsor in 1940. The nonsuppression of documents is moreover assured by the deposit of the microfilm at the National Archives in Washington and the Public Rec ord Office e in London, where the public may consult it, and by the publication ol George O. Kent’s catalogue to it, which lac ilitates aec ess.
WHILE the microfilm cameras were clicking in F.ngland, others were clicking in \mcrtca. In com pli.mcc with anothei U.S, British agreement, the German high command, army, ministerial, and Nazi Baits records had been shipped to the United States. Naval and ait records remained in British custody. The records arrived in Washington [list after the end ol the war in crates and loot lockers. Most went to the former torpedo plant overlooking the Potomac at King and Union Streets in Alex anclria.
They arrived in a chaotic state. The GI’s who had packed them in crates had sometimes wedged the records of one agency in the spaces left by the papers ol anothei. The records themselves ehcl not often carry labels. Sometimes they bad lost the it cardboard covets. And the ransacking they had tut dergone by Nuremberg prosecuiois did not help to keep litem in ordei. Fo make them useful for histotical and intelligence research, the Army had to reorganize each agency’s files into their original pattern, not only to make them accessible, hut also so that the researcher would know the source of a document. This is another way of saying that the basic archival fact had to be determined for many of the records—their provenance, or the office whose files they were.
For this, the Army archivists sometimes had to be detectives. The scribbled marginal notations of officials were often identified by their characteristic color: green for S.S. Chief Heinrich Himmler, vermilion for General Wilhelm Keitel, brown for Gen eral Alfred Jodl, purple for General Georg Thomas. The ribbon that held a document together or a peculiar pattern of holes punched in it sometimes indicated its origin. A German major wrote in longhand an extremely interesting outline of German military activities in France after the Allied invasion; only a note in that same handwriting about an appointment enabled the scholars to trace his name.
Sometimes the archivists could determine provenance only by the backward procedure of using the records to reconstruct what was assumed to be an agency’s organizational structure. They did this by spreading the files out on big tables and shifting them about until they appeared to approximate the original arrangement of the files.
Thus prepared, the records yielded up to grateful American intelligence officials vast quantities of minutely detailed information about the Soviet Union. The German armies, in invading Russia, had photographed the terrain, mapped the roads and railways, studied the Red Army organization, examined its weapons, analyzed its tactics, profiled its officers. Until the start of the U-2 flights about 1956, U.S. agencies obtained much basic intelligence on the Soviet Union from the captured documents, using some 35,000 a year.
But such material is not valid forever. Moreover, there was increasing pressure from the West German government to return the archives, as part of its cultural heritage, to credit its claim to represent all of Germany, and to help run its affairs. On the American side, officials were acutely conscious that the Nazis had looted all of Europe and that this situation was not without similarity.
Consequently, the Army began a review in 1954 to determine which records might be declassified to go back. This excited a fear among historians that they might miss a precious opportunity. Once back in Germany, records might be suppressed: the experience of the Foreign Office files had made the scholars wary. Moreover, the documents were deteriorating. Mimeographed matter was crumbling; teletype strips pasted onto telegraph forms were falling off. Microfilming could preserve them. Hans Kohn, professor of history at the College of the City of New York, led in forming an American Committee for the Study of War Documents. It interceded emphatically with the government and, in a victory unprecedented in the annals of scholarship, won permission to film the documents. In 1956, the year it became a committee of the American Historical Association, it received $69,000 from the Ford Foundation to begin the filming.
THE project historians soon began their labors at the long, gray Alexandria torpedo factory. They first had to complete the work of the Army in straightening out many of the nonmilitary records within the 30,000 linear feet-almost six miles—of files, some of which, said Mrs. Dagmar Perman, second director of the project, “were in a salad edition.”Occasionally provenance could not be discovered, and then the subject matter was set up as the identifying criterion. “It must be acknowledged with admiration,”wrote a German archivist who reviewed the work, “that this mountain of records, largely in a chaotic state, was relatively well organized . . . within the span of a few years.”
The historians next wrote descriptions of the filmed records and noted the few items they were omitting. The folders, stacked on tables, were then wheeled away to the microfilming room, where a processor unbound them, straightened out folded pages, and gave them to one of-at the peak-seven women microphotographers. The cameras also photographed a counter, thus automatically numbering the page. The folders were then rebound, and at intervals of six months, shipped to the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz. In all, the documents filled mote than 15,000 rolls of microfilm containing up to 1200 pages each, making an estimated 18 million pages of material. They range from the most important, such as the only known copy of the complete transcript of Hitler’s trial before a Nuremberg court in 1924, to the most insignifican’t, such as receipts for equipment and schedules of official lecturers.
The historians’ descriptions form the basis for a remarkable and exceedingly valuable series of Guides to German Records Microfilmed at Alexandria, Va. Eight inches high and 14 inches wide, mimeographed, stapled in distinctive buff covers, these finding aids run between 2 and 231 pages; they average 100. The microfilm roll and frame numbers for each item are given in the guide opposite the item’s description. So far 60 guides have been issued; a total of 80 is projected. Though the microfilming is complete, the publication of the guides is not, because the National Archives, which has taken over the work, has only a small staff.
The guides themselves make fascinating reading. For example, Guide No. 39, Records of the Reich Leader of the S.S. and Chief of the German Police (Part III):
Page 9: “Folder containing notes and correspondence of Hochst.SS-Pol.F/Italien Karl Wolll and of his adjutant. Ostubaf. Wenner dealing with negotiations for surrender of German forces in Italy and with post-surrender procedures: also contains some speculation as to the treatment by the Allies of S.S. troops. Apr-May, 1915. Routine administrative matter has not been filmed.”
Page 11: “Hoh.SS-Pol.F./Nordwest (Niederlande) . . . provisions for the care of Dutch women expecting the birth of children of S.S. men, Feb-Mar, 1943.”
Guide No. 54, Records of German Field Commands: Armies (Part Fill), describing appendices to War Dian 8 from section la (operations branch) of the 2d Army:
“Ia, Anlagen z. KTB 8, Opera!ionsakteu. Reports on operations, regrouping, march movements, passwords, training, supplying, casualties, and construction of narrow-gauge railways, roads, and mine fields by the 2d Army and Hungarian Arms units in the Voronezh, Podgrovoe, and Fedorovka areas; results of aerial reconnaissance and monitoring Soviet radio communications; use of indigenous population and alert units: morale of the Red Army and civilian population; transportation and supply situation; enemy land and air operations, troop identification and radio situation; Soviet terrorist organization and its methods; and the weather. Map (1:25,000) showing the location of the main line of resistance. Dec 17-31. 1942.”
A fantastic wealth of information awaits the researcher in these hundreds of tons of documents! Their value lies primarily in the sheer richness of their raw data: they permit the historian to scrutinize events as if through a microscope, to see every detail of a military action, to postulate, through the profusion of dates, trends that he could not possibly see in memoirs and interviews. In addition, the documents bring the historian into intimate contact with the emotional quality of the time. A sardonic marginal comment on a report or its very handwriting may tell more about the true situation than the report itself. One cannot really grasp Himmler’s obsessional nature until one goes through the stacks of paper that he annotated and initialed and dated in one of his eighteen-hour days. For the documents are the stuff of daily life: the scholars were continually finding mixed in with them buttons and thread used by the stenographers, their love notes, their birthday cards, their ration cards. The dilference between working from secondary sources and using the documents is the difference between reading about a person and actually meeting him.
So WHAT have historians found? Were there surprises for them in the documents?
Mans nuggets have turned up. Perhaps the most remarkable is a copy of Hitler s lost “Second Book,” the never published successor to Mein Katnpf. Hints about tins work had cropped up here and there in Nazi literature, even in a play in Vienna, but it seemed to have disappeared;as late as 1959, historian H. R. Trevor Roper spoke of it as no longer existing.
But at just about this time. Richard Bauer, captured documents reference chief, received a query about the missing work from Germany. He remembered that in his special safe was a work labeled a draft of Mein Katnpf. He dug it out and read a memorandum of May 7. 1945. by the U.S, Many intelligence officer who had taken the 324-page untitled typescript from the central Nazi publishing house in Munich. I he technical director had said that it was “an alleged unpublished work by \cloll Hitler.” Bauer quickie saw that the label was erroneous— the work was not Mein Katnpf. Then Gerhard I,. Weinberg. first direc tor of the Uexandria project, who had also been looking for the document, obtained a copy. He confirmed through stylistic and other tests that it was indeed Hitler’s long-lost book. Allusions to current events dated its composition to the summer of 1928. Cross-outs and spaces before periods showed that Hitler had dictated to a typist. But for a number of reasons, he had never published it. Weinberg didand filled in one of the most important gaps in the story of Adolf Hitler.
Most of the documents are, of course, less sensational. They serve primarily to color in pictures previously known only in outline, to amplify history. And their enormous range attracts a wide variety of users. Some study the microfilm ai the National Archives in Washington; others buy copies; others write for information.
A physicist at the I’l auklord Arsenal asked about gun silencers; be was furnished German Army experimental reports and technical manuals. The Journal of American Aviation requested information on the technical development and combat history of German pickaback planes. A Canadian graduate student at Heidelberg used the 92 rolls of film dealing with an S.S. organization to write a 594-page doctoral dissertation on it. A German veteran of tlu* 101st jaeger Division wrote a history ot his old unit with the help of the documents, working at his home from the film that he bought from the National Archives rathri than going to Koblenz for the originals. A professor at the University ot Ankara is studying the relations ot burkes and Russia in the twentieth century; he cannot get at either the Turkish ot the Russian records, but since Ciermans had vers active ambassadors ami militars missions in l’urkes, he can glean a good deal ot information trom their records.
The Israelis asked tin microfilm dealing with Adolf Eichmann when thes were prosecuting him. The furor over Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinget s being an ex-Nazi subsided somewliat when Her Spiegel published a document microtilmed in Me\andria—a 194 \ letter accusing Kiesinget of being the ringleadei in interfering with anti Semitic propaganda.
Sometimes the documents serve unusual special purposes. Once, lot example, thes made possible a precise evaluation of the techniques ot content analysis. During World War 11. American monitors of Nazi propaganda inferred Oerman capabilities and intentions from the inclusion, omission, and spacing of news items and statements in the broadcasts. For example, one analyst predicted itt November, 1945, that a secret weapon would become available in February or March ot 1944. But how accurate was this estimate? At the time 110 one knew, but when the records became available, they showed that that was then precisely what the Germans forecast would be the operational date ol the V-1 flying bomb! Finis the captured documents demonstrated the validity of an important method of social science.
The captured records have greatly improved the writing of military history by making it possible to learn the history from both sides, t he Office of the Chief of Military History has made extensive use of the German documents in its series United States Army in World War II. They have enabled its historians to clear up such mysteries as bow the Germans managed to escape as they did from the Falaise pocket in Normandy and to learn ol the controversy between Field Marshals Erwin Rommel and Gerd von Rundstcdt on how best to defend Fortress Europa. This has provided a more accurate assessment ol what went on; the lessons thus taught by history are better accepted; ami therefore American military thinking, and one hopes action, are improved.
The documents also throw light on Communist history. Z. A. B. Zeman’s publication of selected c aptured papers shows where the Bolsheviks got 1 licit money for propaganda in 1917: from the German foreign minister. Previously the source had been a matter of conjecture. A set of captured captured records has enabled the West to get one of its dearest pictures of the operation of the Soviet Communist Patty. W hen the Germans smashed into Smolensk in 1941, they seized the files of the Communist Party there, and when they retreated, they took with them about 500 of the major dossiers containing about 200,000 pages covering the years 1917-1938.
The Allies in then turn captured these. Merle Fainsod ol Harvard worked bis way through them, and in his Smolensk l nder Soviet Rule be described pans and governmental title in Smolensk Province, frequently quoting reports, letters, and decisions. 1 hose are documents that the Communists thought would never be seen by an outsider, and they give a vivid picture of the inner workings of the Party and its impact upon the populace. They have been called the boa single source of information concerning Communist Party operations within the Soviet Union available to Western scholars. Interestingly, they confirm the picture of Communist soc iety inferred by Western scholars.
BUT if the amplification of history and the improvement of understanding constitute the largest use to which the captured German records have been put, their most important use as in Fischer’s book may be in correcting misconceptions, in demolishing myths, and 111 replacing fiction with fact.
Studies of the Office ol the Chief ol Military History founded almost entirely on the captured records showed that although the world had gotten the impression that blitzkrieg consisted almost exclusively of a whirlwind at mot assault, the Welu mat lit was in fact still using many horses behind its tanks long after the much criticized United Slates Winy had given up horse cavalry and transport. Another case where the documents corrected an accepted story involved the Battle of the Bulge. Legend had it that Bastogtte was the be-all and end-all in holding the line. But the U.S. Army official history showed on the basis of the German records that it was in fact the holding ol the shoulders ol the salient in the Inst forty eight hunts that determined the battle. Bastogne was important, yes, but it was not the critical factor trom the tactical point of view that it is usually thought to be, said thiol historian Dr. Stetson Conn.
Again, it was widely believed lot many years that Lenin’s return to Russia through Getmany in the famous “sealed train" in April of 1917 had taken place at the instigation ol the Geiman gen eral stall. But Wernet Hahlweg, using the documents, demonstrated that the plan had ot iginaied in civilian circles, that the Foreign Office made the arrangements, and that the high command merely signed the traveling papers.
The documents also corrected a misconception of Hitler’s polio toward Poland created In the omission ot certain critical phrases from a Herman White Book on the origins ot the war. The omissions lay in the minutes ot a meeting held Match 21,1939, between Foreign Minister son Rihbentrop and the Polish ambassador to Hermans. As printed in the White Book, the minutes did not include a number ot anti-Soviet statements made by Ribbentrop to shosc that a Polish-Hcrman agreement was possible on a common anti Soviet police. The Nazi Soviet Pact, intervening between the meeting and the publication of the White Book, had made it impolitic to include those statements. It was not until the original minutes svere published that historians were able to see that Rihbentrop had really tried to reach an agreement with Poland and that the Nazi aggression lotlowed ends upon the failure of this attempt.
Another error that the documents rectified was the widely held view that Germany had promised militars aid to Falangist Spaniards before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Not cuds did no paper turn up to support this view, but the published record showed that a strong dillerence ot opinion on the cptestion existed between the Foreign Office and the Heneral Stall, with the foreign Office taking a cautions view. It was not until several months later that Hermans decided to throw its lull weight behind Franco.
These studies are but the first fruits of svhat will be a historians’ harvest overwhelming in us abundance, for the documents are so voluminous, their range so vast, that thes will permit miuutels detailed analyses ol almost any activity of a major nation in the throes of modern war. Moreover, neither the Whaddon Hall nor the Alexandria documents exhaust the list.
A large quantity ot Nazi Parts records, inc luding S.S. personnel files, serves qualified scholars and investigators in the Berlin Document Henier. Cheat Britain followed a dillerent policy from the United States and restituted the naval and the air records after only some selective microfilming. The Library of Congress holds many photographs and sound recordings. The Soviet Union tanned over many files to Fast Germany.
Of the other Axis nations, a few Italian and Hungarian records have been issued on microfilm, and about 2.,| million pages of |apanesc material. The Japanese filming was much less comprehensive titan the German, and the language harrier has prevented as great an exploitation.
Taken as a gigantic whole, what do the captured Herman records show? What conclusions could the historians who worked on them draw from them?
Perhaps the most immediate impression is the tutor talsiis of the myth of Carman orderliness. Both Weinberg and his successor as project chief, Mrs. Perman, fell this. The Nazi Part) and the Herman governmental structure were virtually anarchic, with overlapping jurisdictions and many conflicting responsibilities. This resulted, of course, in impossible inetlic iertex. Complementing this impression is one of sprawling multifarious bureaucracy. “In April of 1945, with Mlied tanks clanking past the shattered w indows of Parts offices, the Fiihrer’s faithful were wot king out the pa pci clip requirements lot i he third quarter of 1945,”wrote Weinberg. “Had the stencil and cat bon pa pet factories been placed at the top of the strategic bombing ollensive’s ptiority list, the whole system might well have collapsed earlier,”
One of the most remarkable aspects ol the story of the seized records is the attitude ot the scholars who worked on them. Mtltost without exception, they remain imenseh interested, even enthusiastic. The reason, they explain, is that the papers, pat ticularly the Foreign Office papers, contain top decisions of the greatest war of all time, These men were all historians of modern Germany, the) had lived through this epoch, and now they were holding in then hands the very papers that Hitler and Himmler. Rihhentrop and Keitel had held in theirs while making the decisions that shaped our lives. These were the secret actions that had determined the fate ol nations, they were real, and these scholars were the first histoiians to know about them, and to know all. for these papers constituted the ultimate evidence beyond which no one else could penetrate. It was beads stuff. Yet it was not without a searing bitterness as well. For the impression that dominates all others emanating from the Reich archives is one ol “the depths to which a supposedly civi1ized jicopie can fall and the degree to whie h the poison penetrated all hurts ol Herman life, wrote Weinberg. And, he added, “the lullci the record, the* deeper the dai k ness ”
I line and again lhr evidence of man’s inhumanity io man rose up off the pages and heal upon the wotkers’ souls. To work in the ilimmlci files lor a yeat, a historian said, was like locking oneself up in a combined insane asylum and torture chamber. One girl ran screaming from the room when she came upon her own com oil i at ion camp papers. \nd in the end the work was humbling. Il brought to mind the evanescence ol all earthly strivings— the vanity of vanities, Ozymandias on a colossal scale. “To think,”said Mrs. Berman, “of (bis whole machine that sat on !mope reduced to this dusty pile of pa pci s which you are complete master of, even to whether they will see the light ol clay.”