Documentation on war crimes committed during World War II, which was smuggled from Eastern Europe and testifies to the earliest phases of the Holocaust, will soon be available to the public. Everything that was once accessible only to members of the UN War Crimes Commission will now be available to the public online, reports the Guardian, noting that the release will ‘change chapters of history.’
The documentation will be published in London by the Wiener Library by the end of the week. These are documents that indicate how Poland and China, rather than the USA and Great Britain, were the first to request that criminals be prosecuted, in a process that history later remembered as the Nuremberg Trials.
The archive, along with the UN commission for prosecuting war criminals, was closed the moment West Germany was formed, an ally in the Cold War, and after the American anti-communist senator, Joseph McCarthy, requested and lobbied for the prosecution of Nazi leaders to cease.
Great Interest
These archives contain material that points to the collection of material evidence regarding crimes committed during World War II, immediately after the establishment of the UN. For example, these documents indicate the existence of allegations of crimes that include rape and forced prostitution as methods of war, and how these allegations were sought to be raised by representatives of Poland, Greece, and the Philippines. This contrasts with the belief that rape and prostitution were only placed in the context of war crimes after the war conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1990s.
