Nazi files on display at Holocaust museum

Italian Foreign Minister Federica Mogherini looks at pictures of Holocaust victims at the Hall of Names on July 16 during her visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem commemorating the 6 million Jews killed by Nazi forces during World War II. Gali Tibbon / AFP

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About 500,000 digitized microfilm images with more than 10,000 case files in multiple languages on Adolf Hitler and other war criminals across Europe and Asia, are now open to public viewing. The Associated Press reports from Washington.

From Adolf Hitler down to petty bureaucrats who staffed the Nazi death camps, thousands of perpetrators of World War II war crimes were eventually written up in vast reams of investigative files-files that now, for the first time, can be viewed in their entirety by the public.

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington has obtained a full copy of the UN War Crimes Commission archive that has largely been locked away for the past 70 years under restricted access at the United Nations. On Thursday, the museum announced it has made the entire digital archive freely available to visitors in its research room.

Although information in the documents has long been known to investigators and historians, the public was kept out.Even researchers at the UN must petition for access through their governments.

Many of those named in the archive were never held accountable.

In addition to the allegations of mass murder against Hitler and his high-level henchmen, the files list thousands of obscure but no less horrendous cases from across Europe and Asia.There is Franz Angerer, a member of the secret police force Gestapo, accused of rounding up inmates in Sosnowiec, Poland, to send to Auschwitz.

Helmut Steinmetz in Warsaw, Poland, was accused of murdering a crippled Jewish man he met on the street, as well as killing a railroad porter with a stick for refusing to carry his luggage.