60 minutes rewind
you're about to see for the first time
secrets of the nazi holocaust that have
been hidden away
for more than 60 years we're not talking
about a missing filing cabinet we're
talking about
thousands of filing cabinets holding 50
million pages it's hitler's secret
archive
the nazis were famous for record keeping
but what we found ran from the bizarre
to the horrifying
this holocaust history was discovered by
the allies in
dozens of concentration camps as germany
fell in the spring of 1945.
the documents were taken to a town in
the middle of germany called
bod arlsen where they were sorted filed
and locked away never to be seen by the
public
until now the storerooms
are immense 16 miles of shelves
holding the stories of 17 million
victims
not only jews but slave laborers
political prisoners and homosexuals
to open the files is to see the
holocaust staring back like it was
yesterday
strange pink gestapo arrest warrants as
lethal as a death sentence
jewelry lost as freedom ended at the
gates of an extermination
camp time stopped here in 1945
the we walked through the evidence with
chief archivist udo yost
he showed us this list of one thousand
prisoners saved by a factory owner
who told the nazis he needed the
prisoner's labor
this is oscar schindler's list
made famous by the steven spielberg
movie
here are the 700 men and the 300 women
whose names were on schindler's list
esther friedman rosa friedlich
reina ferber
the people of schindler's list we also
found the file of frank
annalise marie better known as anne
frank it's her paper trail from
amsterdam to bergen-belsen
where she died at the age of 15.
but most of the names here are unknown
totenbook means death book and just
look at the names of the executed
crowded onto pages single spaced
it must have been tiring just to write
this
let alone kill them all
here we see the cause of that it
and you can see every two minutes they
shot one prisoner
so they shot a prisoner every two
minutes
for a little over an hour and a half
and yes yes now look at the date
it's the 20th of april that was adolf
hitler's birthday
and this was a birthday present a gift
for the fuhrer
this is the bureaucracy that's the
bureaucracy of the devil
the devil is in the details the smallest
details
we were amazed to see that the nazis
were keeping records
of head lice noise control
this is in here you can see the names
and numbers of
each prisoner and the amount of lice
that were found
the nazis couldn't have disease
spreading among slave laborers
that's why you can see he was a
perfectionist
he even put down the size of the lies
small or medium-sized slice paul
shapiro helped pry open the archive he's
director of holocaust studies at the u.s
holocaust memorial museum i'm curious
why did the nazis keep all these records
if they were going to murder these
people anyway
why keep paperwork because they wanted
to show they were getting the job done
so in terms of people whose destiny was
to be
murdered recording how well that was
being done
was very important and those records
make up the largest holocaust
archive anywhere run by the red cross
the international tracing service as
it's known
was set up after the war to trace lost
family members
survivors could write for information
but there was a backlog of 400
000 unanswered letters and neither
survivors
nor scholars got past the lobby what was
the stated reason
for keeping these documents out of the
public eye for more than 60 years
and so respect for the privacy of
individuals
was the the most often cited reason
on the one hand you had governments
stating we're protecting people's
privacy
and on the other hand you had those very
people saying no no we want the material
to be open when germany last spring
became the last of 11 countries to agree
they began the process of opening the
archive
it'll take about a year but we brought
these men to bod
arleson for an advanced look walter
fiden
mickey schwartz and jack rosenthal are
the first holocaust survivors
ever in the archive schwartz of san
diego
was 14 when he watched his parents
herded to the gas chambers at auschwitz
and then later was forced to sign
himself in
at buchenwald can i touch it
please yes absolutely in a sense it's
yours
thank you it's nicolas schwartz that's
my
that's my writing we asked the red cross
to find all the documents for our three
survivors
there were plenty of surprises including
a mysterious reprieve this is a
transport list
for prisoners leaving book involved and
going to
a camp called dora yes do you know what
dora was
yes some sort of a fabrication of
armament
the arms fabricated at dora were the v1
and v2 rockets that reigned on london
and the story of that place is hardly
anybody got out of there alive
look at your name it's on the transport
list to go there
and somebody's drawn a line straight to
the middle of it
they took you off the list did you know
until this moment that you were headed
to dora
no never never never never
[Applause]
wow schwartz had no idea why he was
taken off the list
of 50 people on the page he was one of
only two
with a lifeline straight through his
name
i'm sort of yes i'm shaking i'm scared
right now
looking at that paper makes you scared
right now right now it makes me think
back
and i'm living like there is this
14 year old youngster
and they wanted to kill him i don't know
why i did not ever do anything
any harm to anybody i think i should
have a middle name
my middle name to be mr lucky
walter fiden of new york was 13 and a
prisoner in a nazi ghetto where his
parents died
later he too signed into buchenwald
look down here you signed it
yeah you're right i had better handler i
think then than i have now but
yes who was that boy
who signed this card
a young actually teenager
who had gone through a
great deal become less trusting
of what's told to him
wait a second just a sec ah
but glad to be alive still
you got to overcome it
you have to overcome what the
breaking down because that's one thing
we never did in the camp
we never wanted to break down in front
of some ss man and give him the pleasure
of seeing
us breaking down how do you stop
yourself from breaking down
i chew my lips have you noticed at the
lower lip
and that's what you did in the canvas oh
yes oh yes
and you have to swallow after that that
helps also
this card carried his barracks number 66
and that number alone opened his memory
how many people would have been in block
66
a thousand a thousand oh yeah that's
correct
that's correct oh oh my god what just
popped into my mind
between each blackhead there was a troth
that he could urinate in
and i can see it now and the black
manager over there felt that
this person is just about dead
we put these near that people into that
torch that
other people urinated into
and let them die in those things
the brutality of it
the story will continue after this
jack rosenthal also of new york arrived
with his family at auschwitz the same
month that the nazis took these rarely
seen photos
in a process like this jack and his
uncle were sent to a barracks
while his mother and five sisters and
brothers went straight to the gas
chambers
and the ovens i remember that night
there was a little window in the back
where we were he told me
look out the window what do you see and
i said the sky
is a flame the sky is burning and really
you saw the flames leaking the sky
the stench was terrible it smelled
burning flesh
his family burned that night yet
incredibly
we found the nazis had bothered to
create a form to keep track of jack's
mail
at buchenwald but as you can see
there are no records of letters you
didn't
apparently no one you didn't
so who is going to send me mail i got
news for you
if i would have died in book world
nobody
nobody would ever shed a tear for me
because my whole my whole family
was wiped out before then we were a
family of
eight and i'm the sole survivor
this is that survivor jack as american
soldiers found
him in 1945 on this
personal effects card that you signed in
book involved there's a number up here
it's a
one one eight thirty two thirty 32. yeah
you seen that number before i see it
every time you want to see it
sure no problem
there it is yeah a11
a11 832 it's there
and when i'll die they shouldn't cover
up my arm they should leave it like this
because when the good lord will seed us
i hope he's going to put me front row
center because i deserve it
these men were the first to see their
documents
but the bot arlson archive is being
digitally scanned to be distributed to
research centers
other survivors may yet discover unknown
history
still waiting to be written are you glad
you look back at the documents
definitely i feel like i learned about
me at least what happened
and specifically what i'm glad about
for those people who said the holocaust
didn't happen like the president of iran
if they have any question about it
please come to bad house and
check it out for themselves