Report On Recovery of Nazi Documents
Browne was the author of a 1946 U.S. Army Report: "Covering the locating, safeguarding, collecting and disposition of NSDAP records during period 19 September 1945 to 21 January 1946, by the Office of Military Government for Regierungsbezirk Oberbayern." The report, which is lodged in the U.S. National Archives, describes the discovery of the Nazi Party's worldwide membership card files in May 1945 by U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps personnel.
The report states, "An estimated 68,000 kilos of Party records and documents of Reichsleitung SA were discovered by agents of the 45th CIC Det in a paper mill at Freimann (X-8763). Included among the papers were all Party membership cards with identification photos, documents relating to the Party, SA courts, and SA administration."
Six to seven million of these cards were moved to the Army's Munich headquarters, located in the "Reichfinanzhof" building (Reich Finance Court). Browne's report included a photo of these files.
Browne came upon the remaining files at the paper mill in September 1945. He alerted General Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), which immediately ordered a major task force to organize and catalog the files. Browne's discovery received worldwide press coverage. The files subsequently became the heart of the collections of the Berlin Document Center (BDC), and were instrumental in the Allied Denazification of Germany, and in the Nuremberg War Crimes trials.
Read more about this topic: William D. Browne
Famous quotes containing the words report, recovery, nazi and/or documents:
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world. So if it is correct to say that humor was stamped out in Nazi Germany, that does not mean that people were not in good spirits, or anything of that sort, but something much deeper and more important.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)