Photo by Ryan Bloom

Thousands of records on war crimes committed during World War II are now available to the public at the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

For the first time, the public can easily access the United Nations War Crimes Commission records, which “comprise about 370,000 pages of documents related to alleged Nazi war criminals; the charges filed against them; and meeting minutes, reports, correspondence, trial transcripts, and other papers tied to the commission’s activities.” Previously, the records were kept under restricted access at the UN. Now they’re available for public viewing at the museum’s research room.

From a release:

The files contain information on Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Gestapo and the SS and the orchestrator of the “Final Solution”; Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz killing center doctor known for his macabre experiments on prisoners; Adolf Eichmann, one of the most pivotal actors in the deportation of European Jewry; Elimar Luder Precht, the head of the Auschwitz dental clinic; Miklós Horthy, the regent of Hungary from 1920 to 1944; Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief of Lyons, France; and many other lesser-known perpetrators.

“We have many different war-crimes records from all over the world,” Henry Mayer, the Museum’s senior advisor on archives, said in a release, “but this was a major lacuna in our holdings. The reason we felt that it was time that it should be opened is that similar material all over the world has been opened, including in the United States.”