COLUMN ONE : Who Owns the Nazi Paper Trail? : After World War II, the U.S. Army collected millions of documents on life in the Third Reich. Now they are returning to Germany’s control, and some fear losing access to their telling contents.

Forty-nine years ago, the U.S. Army treated Kurt Rosenow, then a technical sergeant, to one of the finer karma warps of the 20th Century: Ordered back to his native Berlin, he was put to work sifting the rubble of what had been Adolf Hitler’s capital, trying to assemble a paper trail of the Third Reich.

Who, exactly, had belonged to the Nazi Party? What had made the joiners join? How could the newly victorious Allies identify Nazi war criminals among the many Germans who were now protesting their innocence? How to amass the evidence needed for successful prosecutions at the Nuremberg trials, just getting under way that summer?

Into the shattered streets went Rosenow, a German Jew who had wisely taken ship for America in the summer of 1939, just weeks before Germany separated itself from the civilized world in earnest. A successful Berlin lawyer, he had been working as a butler in New York when he was drafted in 1944 and assigned to Army intelligence. Now back in his native city, he and a small group of colleagues began going from house to house, bombed-out ministry to bombed-out ministry, trying in each place to build enough confidence among the shaken survivors to make them tell him where the evidence lay.

And tell him they did.

“We were overwhelmed by the mass of paper that came in, before we actually knew what had happened,” says Rosenow, today a sturdy 88-year-old who lives with his wife in the northern German city of Hanover.

Rosenow didn’t know it at the time, but the papers he and his team were putting together would eventually make up one of the most extraordinary archives in the world: the most complete documentation of the Nazi era ever produced. Rosenow went on to become the archive’s first civilian curator, after he was discharged from the Army in 1946.

Which puts him in a special position today, for now the archive, known as the Berlin Document Center, has become the focus of a controversy stretching across the Atlantic, from Germany to the United States. On Friday, Berlin’s trove of one-of-a-kind documents will pass from American administration to German hands. Some researchers have argued that under German stewardship, the unique files will be less accessible.

What, say the critics, will happen when someone wants to look into the past of a prominent German politician or his family? Will German archival authorities, uneasy about naming Nazi-era names, be willing to open incriminating files for all to see? Privacy laws in Germany are, after all, far stricter than in the United States, proscribing the publication of certain pivotal information until a person has been dead at least 30 years.

“Of course, I’m afraid” about future access to the Berlin Document Center, says Anna Rosmus, a woman from the city of Passau who has made a career of ferreting sensational information out of various German archives and publishing her findings. Her tribulations were portrayed in the film “The Nasty Girl.”

“I’m not sure I’ll have the opportunity to see those files again,” says Rosmus, 34. “For years and years, I’ve had firsthand experience of how much easier it is to get information from the Americans than from the Germans.”

The Berlin Document Center stands today just where it did at the end of World War II: in a barracks-like complex surrounded by barbed-wire fencing that contrasts unpleasantly with the comfortable and well-landscaped residences nearby. During Nazi times, these barracks and the vast chambers beneath them housed an immense telephone surveillance center run by Field Marshal Hermann Goering. Rosenow can still remember how eerie it was when the Americans moved in and found the basements filled with eavesdropping devices, the wires all cut.

For months, during late 1945 and early 1946, Rosenow and his colleagues filled these rooms with hundreds of tons of documents--75 million pages, or enough, he says, to reach eight miles into the sky if stacked one atop the other.

Today, there are nearly 11 million files on members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party--an estimated 85% of the total membership--still arranged in the original wooden file cabinets from party headquarters. There are 600,000 files on the members of the SS, each with a Lebenslauf , or autobiographical statement, and more than half a million files on the Brownshirts, the organized street bullies who promoted Hitler in the years leading to his assumption of dictatorial powers.

About 75,000 files track the careers of assorted Nazi doctors, some of them mere opportunists and not particularly interesting but some of whom went on to become part of the Hitler killing machine and case studies in the human capacity for fiendishness.

Here are Nazi Party membership card No. 6,421,477, belonging to the now-celebrated Oskar Schindler; Goering’s suicide notes, scribbled before he took cyanide in 1946; SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s meticulous expense accounts, and the SS papers of Erich Priebke, now awaiting extradition from Argentina on charges that he helped murder 335 prisoners in 1944.

Here, too, are files that can only be described as bizarre: thousands of marriage applications, for instance, filed with the SS by eager couples who hoped to work as breeders for the racially pure Aryan nation that Hitler wanted to build. These lovers had to persuade their SS superiors to check “Ja” after the question, “Is procreation by this person desirable for the nation?” They did so by submitting proof of their worthiness: handwritten autobiographical sketches, medical records, dental charts, photographs and exhaustive, church-registered pedigrees dating back six generations.

Such obsessively detailed information is tailor-made for social historians trying to learn more about Germany in the years before Hitler rose to power. But it has also been invaluable to Nazi-hunters trying to locate their aging quarries.

Perhaps the most celebrated example arose when a skeleton, believed to be that of the Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele, was found in Sao Paulo in 1985. Forensic scientists turned to the Berlin Document Center’s files and found, in Mengele’s marriage application, information about his teeth and bone marrow, scarred as it had been by a childhood infection--the only reliable such information in the world. The details were then cited as conclusive proof that the skeletal remains were, indeed, Mengele’s.

The center has been used in every major and minor war crimes investigation since the Third Reich fell, says David Marwell, the outgoing American director, himself a historian and former chief of the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit. “Not because we have specific war crimes information, but because we have key personnel files that show where people were and when.”

For more than a quarter-century, American and German officials have been debating, on and off, who the rightful stewards of the Berlin Document Center ought to be. Other Nazi archives once in Allied hands have, after all, long since been microfilmed and passed back to the Germans.

But for the Berlin Document Center it has taken longer to decide because the papers are so personal and so revealing. Americans were concerned about access under German law, and many Germans were content to leave such sensitive papers in foreign hands.

“We have had politicians in Germany who were also members of Nazi organizations,” notes Siegfried Buettner, vice president of the German Federal Archives and the man directing the transfer.

It was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the unification of the former East and West Germanys and the subsequent stand down of the American forces in Berlin that led to the decision to hand over administrative control to the Germans. According to Buettner, the files will be incorporated into the German Federal Archives but kept as a free-standing set of documents within the collection.

Meanwhile, a complete set of microfilms is being shot--38,000 rolls at a cost to Germany of more than $8 million. Under the terms of the transfer agreement, these microfilms will be kept on file at the National Archives in Washington, in case Germany goes back on its repeated assurances of free access.

But these plans have left Jewish organizations, historians and other researchers unsatisfied.

“On a practical level, we have gone a long way toward getting written and oral assurances from the (German) government,” says Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, who cites pledges from Bonn that the Nazi records will be readily available in Germany until the microfilmed copies are ready in Washington. “We will continue to monitor the situation,” he says.

But, he adds, “There is also a moral issue, and I’m afraid it cannot be resolved. These are documents that belong to the United States, because we paid for them with the most precious commodity we have: the blood of young American soldiers. Why give back these documents? I see no reason why the Germans can’t have the (microfilm) copies.”

Anna Rosmus, the self-made historian in Passau, says American attitudes have made her work possible. In her first project, 11 years ago, she says, she wanted to write a school paper on what Passau’s town fathers had been up to during World War II. When she ran into a wall of stone at the municipal archives--no one wanted to reveal the Nazi activities of local leading lights--she sued.

The judge in the case said that if the Americans at the Berlin Document Center were willing to let Rosmus study their supersensitive files--which they were--then the local authorities would have to let her look into the city archives.

“I got free access (in Passau) because it was the Americans who got to decide,” Rosmus says. “I am sure that if it had been up to the German authorities, I would not have been given access.” Although the Passau dispute involved municipal archives, Rosmus says she has encountered bureaucratic obstacles at the federal level too.

Access problems arise mainly about files that name people still living, or dead less than 30 years. Such information falls under Germany’s data protection laws, which instruct federal authorities to balance the researcher’s right to know against the individual’s right to privacy.

“We have to check (the researcher’s project) and balance it against the legitimate interests of the person concerned,” says Buettner, adding that the law gives officials latitude to decide in researchers’ favor. “I don’t feel (excessively) powerful, I feel responsible,” he says, “to make adequate compromises and find the right balance. The German privacy law gives us the responsibility to discern correctly. We find it rather handsome.”

Buettner says German archivists sometimes give researchers only a summary of a file’s contents; in other cases, they may let the researcher view the file. In the most liberal decisions, the researcher may even make and distribute photocopies. But photocopying is limited, Buettner says, to protect innocent third parties who are sometimes named in files--spouses, lovers, children--who were never Nazi Party functionaries.

Rosmus argues, however, that the inability to make copies can sometimes jeopardize researchers and their work. In one case, she says, she found out that the mayor-elect of her hometown had been a Gestapo informant, and she thought her fellow citizens had a right to know. But since the politician was still alive, German privacy laws prohibited her from copying the archival evidence, and the politician was able to deny her charges--at least initially--and to threaten to sue her for slander.

Rosmus protected herself, she says, by persuading a German television crew to go into the archive and make an illegal videotape of the incriminating documents. Then, once the mayor-elect made his denials, the television crew broadcast the proof, and he had to resign.

“If this file had been in any American archive, I wouldn’t have had to use such a trick,” Rosmus says.

True enough, Rosmus concedes, there will always be those microfilms of the Berlin Document Center on file in Washington; a researcher who can afford the trip will be able to make photocopies.

At his temporary offices in Potsdam, housed in a pleasantly ramshackle compound that used to house the central state archives of East Germany, Buettner sighs. “You have to be aware that this is an old discussion,” he says. “These arguments are not new. They have only been sharpened” by the Berlin Document Center transfer.

“In general, I see some distrust of the German government, the German bureaucracy and German society,” he says. “This is a political question and difficult for me to respond to. It is a problem that we will have to deal with for decades, and I would not want to respond to it with aggression. I can try to imagine how these people are feeling. But there is an inability to differentiate between Germans in general and Nazis.”

In Hanover, Rosenow, the original curator of the Document Center, has similar feelings.

“I hate these expressions: The Jews. The Germans. The Communists. The Russians,” he says. “There were members of my wife’s and my own family who came to death. But I have never blamed ‘the Germans.’ In my work, I have found out that you cannot say, ‘This one is a black sheep, but that one has a clean coat.’ The area in between black and white is very, very wide.”

Rosenow goes to his home office and returns with a record of the work that taught him such lessons: a diary of those street-to-street searches that he made in 1945. Each day, with lawyer-like precision, he kept a detailed log, in English, of his impressions and findings as he made rounds to what he called “targets”--buildings where the Army thought there might be Nazi documents.

Many of the entries say simply, “Target completely destroyed,” but for other days there is a wealth of recorded revelations. Here is the 39-year-old Rosenow interviewing the ear, nose and throat specialist who X-rayed Hitler after the failed assassination attempt in July, 1944, that left the Fuehrer with ruptured eardrums and a damaged jaw. There he is on another day, charging into a basement on a tip and finding a weird collection of carved stones assembled in connection with Ahnenerbe --the Nazis’ pseudoscientific effort to identify a noble Germanic tradition.

“We were surprised by the extent of (the Nazi terror)” as the documents began to accumulate, Rosenow recalls. “We had already learned about the mass executions, either by firing squad or gas, shortly after the war. But the numbers were shocking.

“In 1946 . . . we got the special reports of the Einsatzgruppen,” he says, naming the group that conducted the evacuation and killing of Jews in the Baltic republics and Poland. “These were plain statistics--officers reporting back to their commanders that so-and-so many Jews from the following towns were liquidated. That was the expression used, liquidated. The numbers went into the tens of thousands. That was shocking. And there was no doubt in my mind that these documents were real, not falsified.”