Newsletter of the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group DISCLOSURE December 2000 A RMY C OMPLETES M ASSIVE D IGITIZATION M ISSION More than 350 civilians and soldiers recently gathered at the Post Theater at Ft. Meade, Maryland, to celebrate the completion of an unusual U.S. Army mission. The U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), with help from about 150 soldiers and civilians, digitized some 1.2 million documents from more than 11,500 reels of microfilm at the Army’s Investigative Records Repository (IRR) at Ft. Meade, and they completed the job in less than 12 months. The mission was conducted in response to the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, which mandates the declassification and release to the public of records related to war crimes and criminals of World War II Axis Governments. The presenters at the October 25 ceremony included IWG Chair Michael Kurtz, IWG member Elizabeth Holtzman, and U.S. Army Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence Maj. Gen. Robert A. Harding, each of whom presented citations to the individuals involved in the declassification. It was an opportunity to applaud the group’s work and to reflect on the historical backdrop of the effort. Speaking for the IWG, Dr. Kurtz said, “I want to show our appreciation and respect for the effort of the Department of the Army. It has been truly impressive and one that is a model for all the other agencies of the Federal Government to match…. We should also remember the historical context and the victims of war crimes. This is what motivates us.” The Records The U.S. Army’s Intelligence and Security Command first initiated a plan to digitize its IRR holdings in 1992. It languished until the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act made the work even more necessary and timely, since a preliminary review of IRR records found that thousands of files—mostly from the Foreign Personnel and Organizational Files on microfilm—were responsive to the Act. The records form part of the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps Central Registry, which was compiled and microfilmed in Frankfurt, Germany, by the 66th Military Intelligence Group and other military groups from 1946 to 1968. They contain information on foreign personnel and organiza- tions of interest to the Army’s intelligence and counterintelligence offi- cers. With reports, studies, and debriefings of enemy prisoners of war and civilian internees, the files cover a host of subjects and include more than 1,009,999 dossiers. Although used extensively and continuously by the U.S. Government for investigations and background checks, the records were in poor phys- ical condition and lacked a single comprehensive index. The original doc- uments were microfilmed beginning in 1946 by noncommissioned Army officers with little training for the work. Later, many of the original files were destroyed, so the microfilm serves as the surviving record copy for many of the files. Today the document images on the microfilm are often out of focus, scratched, or askew. After years of poor handling practices and storage in Dr. Michael Kurtz presents an award to unstable environmental conditions, much of the microfilm has deteriorated. Some are in Lt. Col. Jasey B. Briley, Commander of the such poor shape that the images not only cannot be read, they barely can be seen. 310th Military Intelligence Battalion. A General’s Promise After the passage of the Nazi War Crime Disclosure Act, it was clear to Lt. Gen. Robert Noonan, then Commander of INSCOM, that the relevant records needed to be identified, declassified, and made available to the public. At an October 1999 meeting of the IWG, he announced that he would deliver relevant files in digital form to the National Archives within a year’s time. It was an astonishing pronouncement. There was no proven tech- Continued on page 2. 1 Army Completes Massive nology capable of capturing, indexing, and searching so many microfilmed records, and Digitization Mission a manual search would take an estimated 181 man-years to complete. Continued from page 1. Ultimately the mission would require an extraordinary combination of human resources and technology. “This represents what happens when National Government agencies, the Major Command, Headquarters, sister brigades, garrison command, military and civilian personnel, and contractors work together,” said Col. Ginger T. Pratt, commander of the 902nd. Indeed, the mission required the coordination of the National Archives and Records Administration, contractor support from two corpora- tions, Department of Army civilian personnel, and at least nine military units and agencies, with the 310th Military Intelligence Battalion forming the backbone of the mission. “What makes this digitization effort different is the scale,” said Mary Eybs, project offi- cer for the Investigative Records Information Systems. “It’s huge,” she said. The work was labor intensive and required a great deal of manpower. Eybs estimates that over the course of the mission about 150 people were involved. Three shifts of 30 to 40 people were set up to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to scan and index the microfilm. “We were living this day in and day out. It was nearly 24-7,” Eybs said. Creating and Using Digital Documents Scanning was processed in batches on three high-speed Wicks and Wilson microfilm scanners. The strings of images were then manually separated into electronic documents and enhanced using software by Kofax, Incorporated. Indexing the documents was one of the most labor-intensive steps, entailing entering information on subject, organiza- tion, individuals, and file name. The high-speed equipment and high-volume software application enabled the team to index 60,000 documents and capture more than 1 mil- lion images a week. The next step was to verify the index information and to check the images for quali- ty.The documents could then be “released” to the document management system for review for relevancy to the list of 60,000 possible war criminal names provided by the IWG. Relevant documents, about 16,000 files in all, underwent a final four-stage review and declassification before being prepared for transfer to the National Archives. In addition to being searchable and easy to retrieve, the digital document format pro- vides other benefits. “Because you have the image digitally, you can enhance it,” said Richard Myers, National Archives IWG staff member. “It’s technology that was inconceiv- able 20 years ago.” The digital improvements of the IRR records are dramatic, rendering The digital improvements legible some documents that were once barely visible. This is good news given the interest in these records. Myers notes that previously of the IRR records are declassified records from the IRR at the National Archives are heavily used. Archivists dramatic, rendering receive up to 100 requests a week for these records. The newly declassified material legible some documents promises to be equally useful. Between 20,000 and 30,000 possible matches were found that were once barely to the IWG list of 60,000 names. Myers estimates that the files will be ready for release to the public in the spring of visible. 2001, after an additional review by the Office of Special Investigations (OSI). The National Archives plans to maintain the documents on a computer server in electronic format and provide researchers a more complete finding aid. For the foreseeable future, archivists at the National Archives will perform searches requested by researchers and provide copies of responsive records. At present, security regulations prevent the fur- nishing of electronic copies. A Model Effort In addition to the mountain of microfilm and the inevitable hardware and software glitches, the Ft. Meade digitization effort encountered a host of more mundane chal- lenges. At the awards ceremony, the impediments seemed to be already part of the mis- sion’s folklore: lightening storms, power outages, blown transformers, and cranky gaso- line generators. There was only one way to overcome the obstacles: teamwork. “Teamwork is the story behind the story,” Maj. Gen. Harding told the group of soldiers and civilians at the awards ceremony. “You pulled together and organized as a team, focusing on one effort. That is tremendously significant.” • 2 IRR DOSSIERS R EVEAL N EW H ISTORICAL D ETAILS Wernher von Braun Among the nearly 1,400 dossiers The IRR file of German rocket specialist Wernher von Braun, who had developed the Nazi V-2 rocket used to attack London, contains one item of particular interest for students of drawn from the Foreign Personnel and the history of espionage. Von Braun was brought to the United States after the war; he Organization Files, maintained by the went to work on rocket development for the U. S. at a plant in Fort Bliss, Texas. In a 1948 interview there, a German journalist managed to extract von Braun’s understanding of U.S. Army’s Investigative Records why V-2 production was delayed until it was too late to make a difference in the war. According to von Braun, while in Switzerland in December 1943, a German industrial- Repository (IRR), and transferred to ist boasted of Germany’s forthcoming secret weapons, giving enough details so that the the National Archives under the Nazi Allies were able to bomb the facilities at Peenemunde, delaying development and pro- duction of the V-2. War Crimes Disclosure Act are the Even in 1948 Braun did not understand what had really happened. The German indus- trialist, whose name was Eduard Schulte, was actually a dedicated anti-Nazi who gave following significant files. The files information to the Allies to help shorten the war. Schulte also leaked an early report that round out the record regarding several the Nazis were planning to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe.