Nazi files on display at Holocaust museum

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"By enabling people today to study and educate based on records like those of the UN War Crimes Commission, we can at least hold those people who committed such atrocities...to account before history," Shapiro says.

For decades, the archive was largely for-gotten.In 1987, researchers and historians were granted limited access, but names of witnesses and suspects not convicted of war crimes were kept off limits.Prosecutors and historians with the US Justice Department's Nazi-hunting unit have used the archive for investigations, as have others in an on-and-off effort to hold Holocaust perpetrators accountable.

Some of the newly accessible records include a few with links to modern-day denials of responsibility for the Holocaust.

They include charges of mass killings by former Hungarian autocrat Miklos Horthy, who today is being memorialized with statues in Hungary amid rising anti-Semitism.

Horthy, the longtime Hungarian leader, was cited as a head of state in a charging document for leading an unprovoked attack against Yugoslavia in 1941 while Hungary was allied with the Nazis, leading to "massacres, murders and torture".

There are also charges against Kurt Waldheim who served in the German army in World War II and went on to become secretary-general of the UN in the 1970s.Due to the secrecy surrounding the UN war crime records, Waldheim's Nazi connection wasn't discovered until his campaign for president of Austria, where he was elected and served from 1986 to 1992.

The accusations were never proven. Waldheim was never taken to trial and he denied any wrongdoing.

The US had no jurisdiction to indict Waldheim but banned him from traveling to the United States, based in part on his documented Nazi connection and a probe that took investigators to Austria, Belgrade and elsewhere.

The archive contains detailed accusations against Hitler and other Nazi leaders.

Associated Press investigative researcher Randy Herschaft contributed to this story

 

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