Holocaust survivors are venting their anger at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum over its unwillingness to allow immediate, unrestricted electronic access to the long-secret records of the International Tracing Service at Bad Arolsen, Germany.

During its annual meeting, held Monday and Tuesday in Amsterdam, the international commission that controls the ITS approved a plan by which millions of digitized images relating to the Holocaust will be transferred to the museum in D.C. for processing, perhaps as soon as the end of this summer, according to Paul Shapiro, director of the museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.

However, the data will not be accessible to the general public until an international treaty governing the release of information from the massive ITS archives is ratified, and that is expected, some observers have said, by the end of this year or the beginning of next year.

Once ratification occurs, the ITS documents deposited at the Holocaust museum will be accessible only through archivists and other staffers at the institution, according to Shapiro. Members of the public will not have direct access via the Internet, and that has upset many survivors.

“Where does the museum get the chutzpah?” asked David Schaecter, president of the Miami-based Holocaust Survivors Foundation. He singled out Shapiro, the point man for the Bad Arolsen transfer.

“I don't know how in the name of God Shapiro can look at himself in the mirror,” especially after his March 28 testimony before a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee, Schaecter said.

However, Arthur Berger, a senior adviser to the museum on external affairs, defended Shapiro, saying he “has probably done more than any individual in the world to get this archive opened.”

Contacted by telephone in Amsterdam, where he attended the ITS commission&rquo;s annual meeting, Shapiro said: “The whole idea is to make this information more accessible. We want to serve these people, not frustrate them.”

But assurances of that sort haven't mollified survivors and their advocates.

“After recent dealings with the museum, it is more and more evident that they are not committed to the survivors in whose name this museum was built,” said Klara Firestone, founding president of Second Generation Los Angeles and a member of the coordinating council of the Generations of the Shoah International.

In the era of instant access to documents offered by Google, Yahoo, Proquest and Lexis-Nexis, Holocaust survivors and advocates say they don't understand why the documents can't be made available to local libraries or home computers the way government documents ordinarily are accessed.

On May 9, a representative of several survivor groups sent a note to congressional staffers who work on committees that are considering the museum's quest for sole control of the archive. Several congressional committees are involved with oversight of treaties and museum funding.

“The consensus – from survivors as well as community leaders – is that something is definitely amiss here,” said Samuel Dubbin, attorney for the Holocaust Survivors Foundation, a national coalition of elected survivor leaders. “The museum seems to be constructing an access protocol based on a continuing sensitivity to European privacy concerns and probably in a way that masks individual company involvement in [the] slave labor system.”

Shapiro said privacy concerns were indeed discussed, but they were not the “principal motivating force” behind the decision to restrict the release of the information. The primary reason the documents will not be freely available through the Internet is that it will be difficult, if not impossible, for the average person to find them online.

Asked if the museum's information-finding arrangement will result in backlogs, Shapiro said “the museum is trying to do the best job it can,” and plans to hire extra personnel, upgrade its computer system and improve staff training in order to expedite requests for documentation.

The existing search mechanism in the Bad Arolsen archives works as fast as Google, but museum sources said they wanted to create a proprietary search engine that will be accessible only from on-site computers.

Esther Finder, president of the Derwood, Md.-based Generation After, asked, “If the German government already paid to have this archive digitized, and it is already in portable hard drives, why can't we use Bad Arolsen's search engine. I don't understand. It seems like another time-consuming layer of complication and expense. The Holocaust survivors want this information and they want it where they can have easy and immediate access to it. What if you don't live in Washington?”

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who served on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council under three presidents, added, “I would hope that the Bad Arolsen archives could be as easily accessible as modern science makes possible. Those archives are for the survivors’ needs and use first, and scholars later.”

Some survivors assert that the archive transfer is just a pretext for the museum to engage in aggressive fundraising. Schaecter bristled as he recalled a recent experience.

“I come back from Washington after I testified before the House about these archives,” he recalled in an interview. “I’m not home for six hours, I get a call from the Boca office of the museum from their fund-raiser, and he says, ‘I heard about your testimony and I heard about you caring’ – and all this nonsense! ‘Since you are deeply involved,’he says, ‘maybe you should make a meaningful donation.’ ”

It “would be such an unbelievable blow if the museum gets these records,” he said.

Berger, however, said the museum was the natural U.S. choice to house the archive.

“As America’s national memorial for victims of the Holocaust and one of the two largest repositories of Holocaust-related documentation in the world” - the other is the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, which also will receive the Bad Arolsen documents - “the museum is the appropriate site in the United States for this collection,” he said.

Menachem Rosensaft, founding chair of International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust survivors, who served for a decade on the museum council, asserted, “I have great respect for Paul Shapiro. I am also convinced that without the museum and U.S. government, we would not have the archive. But the museum is not immune to criticism or difference of opinion. I am a firm believer that all documentation and archives should be as widely accessible as is humanly and technologically possible. So long as there are no longer legal impediments, I see absolutely no reason why the documents should not be made accessible on the Internet.”

The first 10 million images of concentration camp documents will transfer to the museum under embargo, pending full ratification of the treaty releasing the documents. The 11-nation commission that controls the International Tracing Service initialed a May 16, 2006, treaty authorizing release, but each of the 11 nations must ratify the treaty under its existing laws. Shapiro said the public will first have access to the ITS files, at most, “some months” after ratification.

The last four countries – France, Greece, Italy and Luxemburg – are expected to ratify the release late this year or early next year. Once ratified, national delegates must sign the single, controlling copy of the treaty; only then will the treaty be approved and implemented.

Despite repeated requests, the museum has refused to provide a copy of the 11-nation treaty, claiming it was secret.

Congressional sources and State Department sources scoffed at that characterization. A copy of the treaty obtained by JTA confirms that it does not prohibit an American institution from placing the digitized files on the Internet or a national database that can be easily accessed.

Richard Greenberg, WJW associate editor, contributed to this article.

Edwin Black, author of IBM and the Holocaust, is responsible for a series of investigations revealing the contents of the ITS archives at Bad Arolsen.

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