红十字国际委员会28日在日内瓦发表公报说，由其管理的国际寻人服务局保存的5000多万份第二次世界大战纳粹暴行受害者档案开始对公众开放，供历史学家和有关人士查询。

A vast archive of German war records opened its doors to the public yesterday, giving historians and Holocaust survivors who have waited more than 60 years access to concentration camp records detailing Nazi horrors.

The 11 countries that oversee the archive of the International Tracing Service have finished ratifying an accord unsealing some 50 million pages kept in the German town of Bad Arolsen, ITS director Reto Meister said yesterday.

"The ratification process is complete," said Meister, whose organization is part of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

"We are there. The doors are open," he said, speaking by telephone while visiting the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial with a delegation of US congressional staff members.

Greece was the last of the 11 to formally file its ratification papers with the German Foreign Ministry. Poland, which holds the rotating chairmanship of the International Commission governing the archive, now must inform the ICRC that the ratification is complete, the final step in the process.

"It's a relief. It took a long time - far too long," said Paul Shapiro of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has lobbied since 2001 to pry open the ITS archive.

"I am pleased that the archive of the International Tracing Service can now be opened for research," said Guenter Gloser, a German deputy foreign minister responsible for Europe. "I would like to invite all researchers to make use of this, and work through this dark chapter of German history." The archive had been used exclusively to trace missing persons, reunite families and provide documentation to victims of Nazi persecution to support compensation claims.

(Agencies/China Daily)

（英语点津 Celene 编辑）