Russia Shares Nazi Files With U.S.

Russian officials handed over 15,000 pages of classified KGB documents on Nazi war crimes to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Monday in a step toward acknowledging early Soviet-era complicity and aimed at eventual lifting of the “imposed amnesia” about this country’s history.

The sharing of secret, potentially shameful archives would have been unthinkable a decade ago. But the post-Cold War spirit of cooperation has delivered to historians what they believe to be invaluable information on World War II atrocities that killed millions.

At a ceremony at the Grand Kremlin Palace, Alexander N. Yakovlev, a leading reformer here, presented a symbolic sheaf from the box-loads of records to U.S. Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering with the observation that “these pages bathed in blood and suffering” should not remain buried.

The documents--copies that are only the tip of Russia’s archival iceberg on World War II atrocities--have not yet been thoroughly studied. But those who have been working on the research exchange describe their disclosure as a significant contribution to chronicling the darkest era of European history.

Information from this first major release of KGB files will be cataloged by year’s end and relevant documents and summaries made available on the museum’s World Wide Web site, said Wesley Fisher, deputy director of the Washington-based museum’s research institute.

Scholars and officials involved in the project also hailed the release as an important move to shed light on the hidden chapters of Russian history, especially during the short-lived and ill-fated collaboration between former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and the Nazi regime.

After signing a secret nonaggression pact in 1939, the Soviet Union’s leaders stood by as German fascists swept through Poland to an agreed dividing line and waged war against Western Europe. Only after the Nazis broke the accord with their June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union did Stalin and the Red Army join forces with the Western Allies.

“This country is only just waking up from the imposed amnesia and the imposed confabulation of history” concerning the war, said the Holocaust museum’s director, Walter Reich.

Much of the material to be shipped back to Washington is war-crimes trial testimony and documents relating to mass killings in Ukraine, in what is now Belarus and in the Baltic states. It includes material on the trial and execution of SS commander Friedrich Jeckeln--”the butcher of Riga,” known for his heinous crimes against residents of the Latvian capital. Other materials are believed to testify to Kremlin knowledge about the systematic destruction of Jews in the earliest days of the war.

“This helps to partly show what the Soviet Union knew and when they knew it, during the course of the war, about the Holocaust,” said Carl Modig, the museum’s archives project director. “Some mass killings occurred very early on, and the Russians knew about these killings and passed this information along the intelligence chain.”

Vladimir P. Naumov, head of President Boris N. Yeltsin’s special Committee on Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, described the first release of KGB materials as “a small drop” from an ocean of documents in the Kremlin’s possession that he hopes will contribute to greater understanding of Russia’s troubled history.

Historians still lack access to some classified materials. But the larger obstacle to compiling a comprehensive account of war crimes here is the sheer volume of the archives being released for scholarly study only in stages, Naumov noted, adding, “I think the most convincing testimony [about what Stalin knew before the Nazi betrayal] will be found in this group of documents we haven’t gotten to yet.”