Washington - The US Justice Department Tuesday formally transferred more than 50,000 pages of documents about Nazi war criminal prosecutions in the US to Holocaust museums in Washington and Israel. The records are transcripts from more than 40 World War II-related cases it has brought against Nazi war criminals who covered up their pasts when they entered the United States.
They also include documents about three contested extradition matters.
When US justice officials won their cases, the war criminals were stripped of citizenship, extradited or removed from the US.
The documents are being donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
"With the exception of records from the immediate postwar Allied prosecutions in Europe, this collection is the largest body of English-language primary source materials relating to the prosecution of Nazi criminals publicly available anywhere in the world," said US Attorney General Michael Mukasey.
The transfer represents another step in opening long-restricted archives to researchers, victims and family more than 60 years after the end of World War II.
In January, Germany opened to the public 70 million documents from its Holocaust archive, marking a victory for Nazi-era survivors after years of tense international negotiations.
In October, the US Holocaust museum renewed its push for the Vatican to open its archives for the Holocaust period, saying it would allow historical conclusions to be based on fact, not rhetoric.
Mukasey, who spoke Tuesday at the museum, said the newly opened US documents would help "perpetuate the memory of those men, women and children who perished, by ensuring that the truth of their fate that their stories survive in paper and ink for future generations."
"The documents are a permanent record of what happened, and a safeguard against those who might forget or, even worse, deny," he said.
Sara J Bloomfield, director of the Washington museum, said that perpetrators of genocide "must know that the simple passage of time will not exculpate them of their crimes."
Since the office of special investigations at the US Justice Department was created in 1979, it has won more than 100 Holocaust- related cases.
One of its most famous, but as of yet unresolved, cases involved John Demjanjuk, 88, the Ukrainian-born man alleged to have been a brutal guard, known as Ivan the Terrible, at the Nazi's Treblinka death camp.
In a case dating back 30 years, Demjanjuk has been extradited to Israel, acquitted by an Israeli court, returned to the US and had his US citizenship revoked. Until recently, no country had offered to take him.
In June, Germany's top Holocaust crimes prosecutor Kurt Schrimm said he would apply to the German high court for Demjanjuk's extradition to be prosecuted under German criminal law. The court would first have to decide if German prosecutors had authority over the case.
In his speech at the museum, the attorney general singled out another case, that of Aleksandras Lileikis, the wartime chief of the Nazi-sponsored Lithuanian Security Police in Vilnius blamed for at least 50,000 deaths.
Lileikis was found by US investigators living in the north-eastern state of Massachusetts in the 1980s, but he denied having had anything to do with the fate of the Jews.
"It was only when communist rule collapsed in the Soviet Union that an investigator ... was able to access documents signed by Lileikis," Mukasey said.
The documents enabled US prosecutors to have Lileikis stripped of his US citizenship.
Mukasey described how the documents told the story of Gitta Kaplan and her six-year-old daughter Fruma, who had escaped from the ghetto in Vilnius and found refuge in the countryside with two "brave Lithuanians."
After they were discovered, Lileikis signed the order that sent them to their deaths in the infamous killing pits in the forest near the hamlet of Paneriai, in Yiddish "Ponar," on December 22, 1941.
The Lithuanian documents enabled US prosecutors to file suit and strip Lileikis of his falsely obtained US citizenship. Eventually, he was extradited to Lithuania, where in 2000, he was prosecuted for his part in the extermination of Lithuania's Jews.
He was however found unfit to stand trial.
The Republic of Lithuania was one of the main centres of European Jewry during the inter-war period. Ninety per cent of the country's pre-war Jewish population of 220,000 is estimated to have died in the Holocaust.
Mukasey said that the US judge's decision which removed Lileikis' citizenship was among the records being donated Tuesday.
"That decision ... is Fruma Kaplan's memorial," Mukasey said. "And though she no longer lives, her story does in these documents, and through them now in this museum."
