Sunday, June 24, 2007

Holocaust Archive on "60 Minutes"

Tonight's "60 Minutes" featured a fascinating report by Scott Pelley on the Holocaust archive at Bad Arolsen, Germany, which is in the process of opening to the public for the first time. The archive, which takes up more than sixteen miles of shelf space and comprises more than 50 million pages, contains the shockingly bureaucratic records of the various concentration and extermination camps - from execution logs to head lice examinations.

The archive has been closed to both survivors and scholars until recently; the facility began a gradual opening process in April of 2006, and is expected to be fully open by next fall. The documents are also being digitized for distribution to other research centers.

Text and video of Pelley's report are here.