UN war crimes archive 'should be open to public

 

 

Maev Kennedy and Associated Press 

A British academic is calling on the government to obtain and make public a vast but little known United Nations archive documenting 10,000 cases of possible second world war crimes.

The cases range from a Japanese commander accused of incitement to rape – which would not be recognised as a war crime for another half century – to a Gestapo officer who drowned hundreds of Jewish prisoners in a sewage pond in the gardens of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

The documents include reports of 2,000 prosecutions and thousands more of individuals suspected of war crimes that have never been made public.

Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, said the United Nations War Crimes Commission archive, held at the UN headquarters in New York, was not just of interest to historians but could be invaluable in prosecuting contemporary crimes.

"The importance of this archive could lie in prosecuting today for crimes of aggression, rape, cultural crimes, environmental crimes, because there's a wealth of precedent far beyond Nuremberg," he said. "In fact, these trials are 100 times greater in extent than the Nuremberg trials.

"We've asked the British government to obtain a copy, which it is entitled to do, for the use of researchers here, and that the British government should support the publication at a minimum of these 2,000 trials, the records of which are in New York."

The archive includes the crimes of a Gestapo officer at Buchenwald, described as "a particularly bloodthirsty torturer" and cases of mass rape and murder in Greece and Poland. The conviction of a Japanese commander for permitting or inciting his troops to rape is recorded in a document signed by General Douglas MacArthur.

It was not until 1998 that a UN tribunal, prosecuting leaders of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, cited rape along with torture and murder in a trial for crimes against humanity. The international criminal court added rape as a crime against humanity in 2001 in a prosecution against Bosnian Serb troops.

Plesch believes almost all those named as suspects in the archive are now dead, but tracking down Nazi war criminals is not ancient history. Last year, John Demjanjuk was wheeled into a Munich court to be convicted at the age of 91 as an accomplice in the murder of 27,900 Jews at Sobibor in Poland. He spent decades fighting deportation orders from Cleveland, Ohio, and had already won a reprieve from a death sentence passed by an Israeli court in 1986.

The archive has been accessed by only a handful of historians under tightly controlled conditions. Until Plesch complained, they were forbidden to take any notes.

Plesch's demand for the archive to be opened is backed by Ben Barkow, director of the Wiener Library in London, the world's oldest Holocaust memorial institution. The library would be prepared to house a copy of the archive under closed conditions while the question of public access was decided.

Paul Shapiro, director of the Centre for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which has also applied for wider access, said the archive held "a significant amount of unique material".

The archive, held in 400 boxes, includes almost 400,000 pages of documents, mainly transferred to 184 reels of microfilm but not digitally stored or indexed. It contains the records of tThe United Nations War Crimes Commission was established in October 1943 by 17 allied nations to list and compile evidence and court records on alleged war criminals.

Only a few of the cases were prosecuted at the Nuremberg trials in 1945-46, but thousands of now almost forgotten trials were held in 15 different countries.

Historians were given access to the archive after demands in 1986 from Binyamin Netanyahu, then Israel's ambassador to the UN. Permission is needed from a historian's own government and the UN and only a handful of academics have obtained it.

Payton Knopf, the US deputy spokesman at the UN, told Associated Press: "We are aware of requests to open the archives to the public and are reviewing the issue."

Plesch said: "This is just of academic interest only if you think prosecution for environmental crimes is no longer relevant, if you think a note about prosecuting for rape as a war crime under the signature of General MacArthur is no longer relevant, if you think the potential to mine 100 times more cases than were ever considered at the Nuremberg trials has no contemporary relevance."

Guardian