West German war crimes investigators have found the “complete file” of Nazi S.S. Col. Adolf Eichmann’s Jewish liquidation quarters and have uncovered documents spelling out the war crimes guilt of many other Nazis who may now be brought to trial.
The Eichmann files and a mass of evidence incriminating other Nazis were located here in various warehouses and in the archives of the Library of Congress by a West German investigating team that was given permission to search for the missing Nazi records.
The Eichmann files were found in a huge and poorly catalogued mass of documents captured in Germany by the American forces and brought here after the war. The Germans indicated that the material will be turned over to Israel for use in preparing for the forthcoming trial of Eichmann there on charges of crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity.
Announcement of the discovery was made here at a press conference at the German Embassy by Erwin Schuele, head of the West German Central Office for Prosecution of Nazi War Crimes, a cooperative bureau maintained by the justice ministries of the various West German states.
Mr. Schuele was granted permission to search here for documents that might provide evidence against Eichmann and other war criminals. The German investigator, who began his research in Washington three weeks ago, said he now had the records of Eichmann’s notorious “Section IV-B-4 of the Gestapo, the German secret police. This office controlled the liquidation of Jews throughout German-occupied territories.
Mr. Schuele reported that he had found a mass of “immensely valuable” documents stored in warehouses here and in the Library of Congress archives. American authorities apparently, in all the years since World War II, did not conduct a thorough research of the war crimes material.
Mr. Schuele and his aid, Kurt Hinrichsen, expect to spend as much as ten more weeks here exploring the mountain of material they have uncovered. Already, many documents have been found to prove the guilt of several other Nazi criminals who face trial in West Germany. He declined to identify these Nazis.
The German researchers avoided criticism of the American authorities but could not conceal their amazement that, in the many years since the war, the Eichmann material and other data about the liquidation of the Jews by the Nazi regime had remained buried here.
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