European Leaders Call for Full Access to Holocaust Files

Saying the Holocaust must be “seared in our collective memory,” international leaders Friday urged all countries to open secret government files on the Nazi extermination campaign and promote education about the genocide.

“We share a commitment to throw light on the still obscured shadows of the Holocaust,” Swedish Foreign Minister Lena Hjelm-Wallen said as she read the final declaration from the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust.

The three-day conference drew more than 600 participants from 46 countries, mostly in Europe. The final statement included a pledge to take all necessary steps to open archives to “ensure that all documents bearing on the Holocaust are available to researchers.”

“The magnitude of the Holocaust, planned and carried out by the Nazis, must be forever seared in our collective memory,” the declaration said.

U.S. envoy Stuart E. Eizenstat said governments should declassify Holocaust-related files and make them accessible.

He called on Russia to open its archives on Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from Nazi deportation to death camps.

Wallenberg disappeared in 1945 after Soviet occupation troops detained him. The official Soviet account said the diplomat, who was in his mid-30s, died of a heart attack in a prison in 1947, but that account has been widely questioned.

Speakers at the three-day conference stressed the importance of better teaching about the Holocaust, in which the Nazis killed 6 million Jews during World War II. They said the need for research and education is stronger now that participants and survivors are elderly and dying.

“We appeal to you all, for your sake and for your children’s sake, do not forget us,” said survivor Jerzy Einhorn, a professor at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute. “You must never forget what can happen when organized Nazism gets established.”