File under: AFT

About effing time. These archives should never have been made secret in the first place.

Diplomats from 11 countries agreed Tuesday to bypass legal obstacles and begin distributing electronic copies of documents from a secretive Nazi archive, making them available to Holocaust researchers for the first time in more than a half century.

The decision was meant to avoid further delays in allowing Holocaust survivors to find their own stories and family histories, and for historians to seek new insights into Europe’s darkest period.

The countries governing the archive maintained by the International Tracing Service approved a plan to begin transferring scanned documents as soon as they are ready so that receiving institutions can begin preparing them for public use, said a delegate, requesting anonymity because a formal announcement was due later Tuesday.

The decision circumvents the requirement to withhold the documents until all 11 countries ratify the 2006 treaty amendments that enabled the unsealing of the documents. Ratification is still pending in four countries, and Tuesday’s vote was likely to shave several months from the distribution timetable.

But they’re still not giving full access to the people who need it the most.

Three countries, the United States, France and Germany, pledged to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to offset costs for preparing and transmitting the papers, said the delegate.

But some U.S. survivors expressed dismay that the documents will remain restricted to a single place the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and that they won’t have unfettered access.

“I’m anxious, because 105 people from my immediate family did not make it. I am the only survivor,” said David Schaecter, of Miami, Fla. “How do I obtain what I am rightfully entitled to obtain (to know) what happened to these 105 people,” he said.

I cannot imagine the loss of 105 relatives. I don’t even know if I have 105 relatives. I suppose I must. My great-grandfather had nine children, of whom my grandfather was the oldest. But he had them all in Scotland and America, so that part of the family made it through the Holocaust intact. And I’ve heard that I still have relatives in Riga, where my great-grandfather came from. I suspect my grandmother’s mother’s family—the Rieders from Germany—did not fare so well.

Perhaps now I can search the archives and find out.