Israel will receive Thursday from the UN archive on Nazi war criminals copies of 1,500 files. This would bring the total number of files obtained by the Israeli government from the UN archive to 2,347.
The archive, which has about 40,000 files, was established by the former members of the United Nations War Crimes Commission after World War II. The archive is located in Manhattan. At present, only government members of the UN are allowed to inspect the files.
A spokesman for the Israel UN Mission told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Wednesday that three files among those to be given to Israel Thursday are those of Dr. Ludwig Fischer, the governor of Warsaw during the war, who deported tens of thousands of Jews to concentration death camps. He was sentenced to death by a Polish court and executed in 1947; Dr. Erich Gruen, who conducted medical experiments on Jewish prisoners in the Maidanek concentration camp and murdered Jewish and non-Jewish inmates, his whereabouts are not known; Dr. Alfred Meyer, the governor of North Westphalia in Germany during the war, who was responsible for the robbery and confiscation of Jewish art treasures. He committed suicide in 1945. The Israeli UN Mission will hold a press conference Thursday at the UN with Nobel Laureate Eli Wiesel to announce that it received the 1,500 new files.
Meanwhile, Poland joined 13 other former members of the War Crimes Commission who now favor opening the UN files to the public. Only three of the 17 former members of the Commission are still opposed. They are France, Czechoslovakia and India.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
