Archive Helps Detail Scope of Nazi Camps

This aerial view shows the layout of the largest concentration camp and death camp run by Nazi Germany during World War II at Auschwitz near the Polish town of Oswiecim, Poland, Aug. 25, 1944. Auschwitz is the main camp and Birkenau is the nearby extermination center. (AP Photo) (AP)

In a series of reports over several years, one prisoner is repeatedly denounced as a "stubborn ... Bible student," who tried "to promote his Biblical verses through the hammer and sickle and the Soviet star." Though it did not specify, the wording suggested that the inmate was a Witness apparently trying to convert his communist prison mates.

Before being released, prisoners had to sign a declaration that they would never speak against the Nazis and would report anyone who did. "I will not ask for any compensation," the pledge concluded. "I have not been forced to make this declaration."

The ITS files will be a boon to the researchers in Washington, who are compiling a seven-volume encyclopedia of all known sites where "undesirables" were detained, tortured, put to work or killed. The first volume is in the final editing stage _ probably too late to take advantage of the Bad Arolsen archive.

Project director Geoffrey Megargee said the museum team gathered fragmentary evidence from different sources to assemble the list.

"Most historians didn't have a grasp of the scope of the whole universe of camps and ghettos," he said. "Each of them knew their own little slice."

When they began work six years ago, Megargee said the researchers estimated 5,000 to 7,000 sites existed. "Based on our research, it is now clear that there were over 20,000 such sites in Germany, in German-occupied territories and in the states allied with Nazi Germany," he said.

Steven Katz , director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University who is not connected with the project, said the encyclopedia will be "enormously useful." Though it will have few surprises for scholars, others using it as a reference tool "will be astonished at the scope of the Nazi enterprise" and the collusion of German industry, he said.

The explosion of knowledge followed the end of the Cold War, when scholars could reach into long-hidden sources in Eastern Europe. Some of the increase is explained with the inclusion of smaller camps, which had just a few hundred inmates, and of prisoner-of-war camps which shifted location frequently. Until the encyclopedia project, no one had tried to pull it all together into one comprehensive resource, Megargee said.

"When we dig into the Arolsen files, we'll find that what was for us just a name, just a location, is going to take on some life, because all we've had is some notation somewhere that there was such a place," he said.

More information was disclosed in compensation claims after the Germany government and German industries created a $6.6 billion fund in 2000 to compensate people exploited as wartime slave laborers.

Gunter Saathoff, the director of the German Foundation which administers the fund, said nearly 1.7 million people applied for restitution, including some 8,000 who served as human guinea pigs for Nazi medical experiments. The final payments were being made Dec. 31.

The Washington historians say more than 100 local detention camps were set up in the first months of the Nazi regime in 1933, mainly for political prisoners. By mid-1934 control was centralized under the command of SS chief Heinrich Himmler.