CBS News, Revisiting The Horrors Of The Holocaust

(CBS) This segment was originally broadcast on Dec. 17, 2006. It was updated on June 21, 2007.

For the first time, secrets of the Nazi Holocaust that have been hidden away for more than 60 years are finally being made available to the public. We’re not talking about a missing filing cabinet - we’re talking about thousands of filing cabinets, holding 50 million pages. It's Hitler’s secret archive.

The Nazis were famous for record keeping but what 60 Minutes found ran from the bizarre to the horrifying. This Holocaust history was discovered by the Allies in dozens of concentration camps, as Germany fell in the spring of 1945.

As correspondent Scott Pelley reports, the documents were taken to a town in the middle of Germany, called Bad Arolsen, where they were sorted, filed and locked way, never to be seen by the public until now.

The storerooms are immense: 16 miles of shelves holding the stories of 17 million victims – not only Jews, but slave laborers, political prisoners and homosexuals. To open the files is to see the Holocaust staring back like it was yesterday: strange pink Gestapo arrest warrants as lethal as a death sentence, jewelry lost as freedom ended at the gates of an extermination camp. Time stopped here in 1945.

Pelley walked through the evidence with chief archivist Udo Jost. He showed 60 Minutes a list of 1,000 prisoners saved by a factory owner who told the Nazis he needed the prisoners labor. This was the list of Oskar Schindler, made famous by the Steven Spielberg movie.

"Here are the 700 men and the 300 women whose names were on Schindler’s list," Jost explains.

The 60 Minutes team also found the file of "Frank, Annaliese Marie," better known as Anne Frank. It’s her paper trail from Amsterdam to Bergen-Belsen, where she died at the age of 15.

But most of the names here are of unknown people. While the Nazis did not write down the names of those executed in the gas chambers at places like Auschwitz, they did keep detailed records of millions of others who died in the camps. Their names are listed in notebooks labeled “Totenbuch,” which means “death book.” The names are written here, single-spaced, in meticulous handwriting.

"Here we see the cause of death: executed. And you can see, every two minutes they shot one prisoner," Jost explains.

"So they shot a prisoner every two minutes for a little over an hour and a half?" Pelley asks.

"Yes. Now look at the date: it’s the 20th of April. That was Adolf Hitler’s birthday. And this was a birthday present, a gift for the Führer. That’s the bureaucracy of the devil," Jost says.

The devil is in the details - the smallest details. Pelley and the 60 Minutes crew were amazed to see the Nazis kept records of head lice.

"You can see the names and numbers of each prisoner, and the amount of lice that were found," Jost says.

The Nazis couldn’t have disease spreading among slave laborers. "You can see he was a perfectionist. He even put down the size of the lice. Large, small or medium-sized lice," Jost comments about the Nazi lice inspector.

Despite 16 miles of shelves and millions of execution orders, I have no doubt that Holocaust deniers will continue to maintain that there is no proof that more than a handful of Jews died during WWII, no matter what the Nazis proudly wrote and compiled.

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VOA News, 21 Sep 2009, Iran's Ahmadinejad Promotes Holocaust Denial on Eve of UN Visit

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is again highlighting his denial of the Holocaust, saying the anger his comments provoke is a source of pride.

Mr. Ahmadinejad's comments Monday come shortly before he heads to the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Last week, he said the Holocaust is a lie created by Western nations to justify the creation of Israel.