War crimes files revealing early evidence of Holocaust death camps that was smuggled out of eastern Europe are among tens of thousands of files to be made public for the first time this week. 
 
 The once-inaccessible archive of the UN war crimes commission, dating back to 1943, is being opened by the Wiener Library in London with a catalogue that can be searched online. 
 
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 The files establish that some of the first demands for justice came from countries that had been invaded, such as Poland and China, rather than Britain, the US and Russia, which eventually coordinated the post-war Nuremberg trials. 
 
 The archive, along with the UNWCC, was closed in the late 1940s as West Germany was transformed into a pivotal ally at the start of the cold war and use of the records was effectively suppressed. Around the same time, many convicted Nazis were granted early release after the anti-communist US senator Joseph McCarthy lobbied to end war crimes trials. 
 
 Access to the vast quantity of evidence and indictments is timed to coincide with the publication on Tuesday of Human Rights After Hitler: The Lost History of Prosecuting Axis War Crimes by Dan Plesch, a researcher who has been working on the documents for a decade. 
 
 The documents record the gathering of evidence shortly after the UN was founded in January 1942. They demonstrate that rape and forced prostitution were being prosecuted as war crimes in tribunals as far apart as Greece, the Philippines and Poland in the late 1940s, despite more recent suggestions that this was a legal innovation following the 1990s Bosnian conflict. 
 
 
 
 The Polish government in exile, the files also record, supplied extraordinarily detailed descriptions to the UNWCC of concentration camps such as Treblinka and Auschwitz, where millions of Jews were gassed. The accounts had been smuggled out of occupied eastern Europe. A charge sheet from April 1944 mention victims being forced to strip off clothing and how “the terracotta floors in the chambers … became very slippery when wet”. 
 
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 The Wiener Library was founded in Amsterdam in 1934 by Dr Alfred Wiener to monitor Nazi antisemitism. He shipped his collection to London on the eve of the second world war, then worked with the British government to inform officials about Hitler’s regime and provide evidence for the Nuremberg trials. 
 
 Now based in Bloomsbury, central London, the library supports study of the Holocaust and genocide. It also works with the International Tracing Service to provide free help to those searching for relatives who vanished into the concentration camps. 
 
 “The UN War Crimes Commission catalogue, which can be searched online, will be available through our website this week,” the library’s archivist, Howard Falksohn, said. “People will then be able to come in and look through the archive itself. 
 
 “We anticipate a lot of interest. Some of the PDF files [on to which the 900GB UN archive has been copied] each contain more than 2,000 pages. This is the first time they will be available to anyone in the UK. It may well be that people will be able to rewrite crucial chapters of history using the new evidence.” 
 
 Plesch, who is the director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at Soas in the University of London, had to get special permission to read the documents, which were closely guarded by the UN in New York. 
 
 Only researchers who received authority from their government and consent from the UN secretary general were allowed to read them, and they were not allowed to take notes or copies. Plesch helped persuade diplomats, including the then US ambassador at the UN, Samantha Power, to release the secret material. 
 
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 “This is a huge resource for combating Holocaust denial,” Plesch said. “The German national authorities were never given access to the archive by the allies after the war. All of this has never seen the light of day.” 
 
 Some of the earliest files of evidence were collected to indict Adolf Hitler directly for his role in the coordinating and controlling massacres carried out by Nazi units in Czechoslovakia. Much of the evidence was collected by the Czech government in exile. There are more than 300 pages detailing his orders and responsibilities. The Nazi leader was eventually indicted in secret by a meeting of the UNWCC in late 1944 as Luftwaffe bombs fell on London. 
 
 One affidavit in the files is from a British soldier, Harry Ogden, who was captured at Narvik in Norway in 1940, escaped from a prisoner of war camp to join Polish partisans and was re-imprisoned in another POW camp alongside Auschwitz. 
 
 By the late 1940s, the US and British governments were winding down prosecutions of Nazis. President Harry Truman made anti-communism, rather than holding Nazis to account, a priority, Plesch says. “Even action against the perpetrators of the massacre of British RAF officers attempting to escape from prison camp Stalag Luft III, a flight made iconic by films such as The Great Escape, was curtailed.” 
 
 
 
 ||||| These are the 8,000 Charge Files submitted by the various members states to the UNWCC. These were pretrial documents submitted to the Commission for approval; each contained the details of a given crime (suspects, location, laws violated, details of the atrocity or war crime in question), as well as a summary of the evidence available to prosecutors at the time (many of the early cases were submitted while the war was ongoing, meaning that they were based on evidence smuggled out of refugee camps). These were then assessed by the Commission, which judged whether there was a prima facie case or not; if there was, these would then be approved for prosecution in UNWCC-supported national courts. 
 
 This also includes a number of cases that were withdrawn by their member states, and not pursued. In the majority of cases, this seems to be because the charges in question were found to be erroneous, or lacking sufficient basis to even pursue charges. 
 
 These are useful sources of historical information – as well as providing extremely fulsome historical detail on war crimes and the Holocaust, they also provide useful historical context, showing how much was known at any given point (especially regarding official knowledge of the Holocaust). They also provide a valuable historical precedent in international criminal law, showing early legal rulings on issues such as war crimes, command responsibility, and the prosecution of sexual violence. ||||| The Allied Powers were aware of the scale of the Jewish Holocaust two-and-a-half years earlier than is generally assumed, and had even prepared war crimes indictments against Adolf Hitler and his top Nazi commanders. 
 
 Newly accessed material from the United Nations – not seen for around 70 years – shows that as early as December 1942, the US, UK and Soviet governments were aware that at least two million Jews had been murdered and a further five million were at risk of being killed, and were preparing charges. Despite this, the Allied Powers did very little to try and rescue or provide sanctuary to those in mortal danger. 
 
 Indeed, in March 1943, Viscount Cranborne, a minister in the war cabinet of Winston Churchill, said the Jews should not be considered a special case and that the British Empire was already too full of refugees to offer a safe haven to any more. 
 
 “The major powers commented [on the mass murder of Jews] two-and-a-half years before it is generally assumed,” Dan Plesch, author of the newly published Human Rights After Hitler, told The Independent. 
 
 “It was assumed they learned this when they discovered the concentration camps, but they made this public comment in December 1942.” 
 
 Mr Plesch, a professor at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS University of London, said the major powers began drawing up war crimes charges based on witness testimony smuggled from the camps and from the resistance movements in various countries occupied by the Nazis. Among his discoveries were documents indicting Hitler for war crimes dating from 1944. 
 
 In late December 1942, after the US, UK and others issued a public declaration about the Jewish slaughter, UK Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told the British parliament: “The German authorities, not content with denying to persons of Jewish race in all the territories over which their barbarous rule extends, the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people.” 
 
 Mr Plesch said that despite the collection of evidence and the prosecution of hundreds of Nazis – a judicial process that has been overshadowed by the trial of the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg – the Allied Powers did little to try and help those in peril. He said efforts by President Franklin D Roosevelt’s envoy to the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), Herbert Pell, were pushed back by anti-semites in the US State Department. 
 
 Mr Pell would later claim that individuals within the State Department were concerned that America’s economic relationship with Germany after the war would be damaged if such prosecutions went ahead. After Mr Pell went public with the scandal, the State Department agreed to the prosecution of the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg, something that gathered pace after the highly publicised liberation of the concentration camps in the summer of 1945. 
 
 “Among the reason given by the US and British policy makers for curtailing prosecutions of Nazis was the understanding that at least some of them would be needed to rebuild Germany and confront Communism, which at the time was seen as a greater danger,” writes Mr Plesch. 
 
 Mr Plesch said the archive on which he based his research was closed to researchers for 70 years. Those wishing to read the UNWCC archive required the permission not only of the person’s own national government, but the UN Secretary General. Even then, researchers were for several years not permitted to make notes. 
 
 Former American ambassador to the UN Samantha Powers took the action that made the archive available. 
 
 Mr Plesch said the new material provided a further “cartload of nails to hammer into the coffins” of Holocaust denial – not that further evidence was required. 
 
 Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance memorial in Israel, says on its website that “information regarding mass murders of Jews began to reach the free world soon after these actions began in the Soviet Union in late June 1941, and the volume of such reports increased with time”. 
 
 It refers to the December 1942 declaration condemning the extermination of Jewish people. 
 
 “Notwithstanding this, it remains unclear to what extent Allied and neutral leaders understood the full import of their information,” it adds. “The utter shock of senior Allied commanders who liberated camps at the end of the war may indicate that this understanding was not complete.” 
 
 The UNWCC archive is this week being presented to the Wiener Library in London, the world's oldest Holocaust archive and Britain's largest collection on the Nazi era, where it will be available for scholars to access online. 
 
 Ben Barkow, the library’s director, said Mr Plesch’s findings may not change the general understanding of the Holocaust, but were interesting and had significance to scholars. 
 
 He said Mr Plesch had doggedly continued to search a difficult-to-access archive that most scholars had assumed contained nothing new. “People didn’t recognise the value of it,” he said. 
 
 He said the material uncovered by Mr Plesch was particularly interesting because it showed that 70 years ago, the international community was considering the issue of sexual crimes as part of the broader war crimes narrative. He said: “It shows that this was not something that was only thought about after events like Rwanda.” ||||| Previously unseen documents containing the earliest accounts of the Holocaust showing the West knew of Nazi war crimes before discovering concentration camps will be released to the public in Britain this week. 
 
 The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide will upload the documents to its website, where they will be searchable. The material was smuggled out of Eastern Europe as early as 1943, and was stored in the archive of the UN War Crimes Commission. 
 
 Archival research by Prof. Dan Plesch of the University of London made the release to the public possible. Plesch received special access to the documents, which are kept in New York. He published some of them in his new book, “Hitler: The Lost History of Prosecuting Axis War Crimes.” 
 
 “This is a huge resource for combatting Holocaust denials,” Plesch told The Guardian. “All of this has never seen the light of day.” 
 
 According to The Guardian, Plesch persuaded diplomats, including Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the UN under Barack Obama, to release the secret material. 
 
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 The documents include information that the Polish government in exile collected, such as detailed descriptions of death camps like Treblinka and Auschwitz, which were smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. For instance, a document from April 1944 describes victims being forced to undress. The Czechoslovakian government in exile provided other documents in an attempt to implicate Adolf Hitler for his part in the war crimes being committed by his country. Another account comes from a British soldier imprisoned by the Nazis who escaped, joined the partisans and was captured again. 
 
 Despite these accounts collected by the West, the governments of the United States and Britain were in no hurry to take action, Plesch told The Independent. A combination of anti-Semitism in the U.S. State Department and concerns about America’s economic relationship with post-war Germany played a role in the foot-dragging, he said. ||||| As Allied troops moved across Europe in a series of offensives against Nazi Germany, they began to encounter tens of thousands of concentration camp prisoners. Many of these prisoners had survived forced marches into the interior of Germany from camps in occupied Poland. These prisoners were suffering from starvation and disease. 
 
 Soviet forces were the first to approach a major Nazi camp, reaching Majdanek near Lublin, Poland, in July 1944. Surprised by the rapid Soviet advance, the Germans attempted to hide the evidence of mass murder by demolishing the camp. Camp staff set fire to the large crematorium used to burn bodies of murdered prisoners, but in the hasty evacuation the gas chambers were left standing. In the summer of 1944, the Soviets also overran the sites of the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers. The Germans had dismantled these camps in 1943, after most of the Jews of Poland had already been killed. 
 
 The Soviets liberated Auschwitz, the largest killing center and concentration camp, in January 1945. The Nazis had forced the majority of Auschwitz prisoners to march westward (in what would become known as "death marches"). Soviet soldiers found over six thousand emaciated prisoners alive when they entered the camp. There was abundant evidence of mass murder in Auschwitz. The retreating Germans had destroyed most of the warehouses in the camp, but in the remaining ones the Soviets found personal belongings of the victims. They discovered, for example, hundreds of thousands of men's suits, more than 800,000 women's outfits, and more than 14,000 pounds of human hair. 
 
 In the following months, the Soviets liberated additional camps in the Baltic states and in Poland. Shortly before Germany's surrender, Soviet forces liberated the Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrueck concentration camps. 
 
 US forces liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, on April 11, 1945, a few days after the Nazis began evacuating the camp. On the day of liberation, an underground prisoner resistance organization seized control of Buchenwald to prevent atrocities by the retreating camp guards. American forces liberated more than 20,000 prisoners at Buchenwald. They also liberated Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenbürg, Dachau, and Mauthausen. 
 
 British forces liberated concentration camps in northern Germany, including Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen. They entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, near Celle, in mid-April 1945. Some 60,000 prisoners, most in critical condition because of a typhus epidemic, were found alive. More than 10,000 of them died from the effects of malnutrition or disease within a few weeks of liberation. 
 
 Liberators confronted unspeakable conditions in the Nazi camps, where piles of corpses lay unburied. Only after the liberation of these camps was the full scope of Nazi horrors exposed to the world. The small percentage of inmates who survived resembled skeletons because of the demands of forced labor and the lack of food, compounded by months and years of maltreatment. Many were so weak that they could hardly move. Disease remained an ever-present danger, and many of the camps had to be burned down to prevent the spread of epidemics. Survivors of the camps faced a long and difficult road to recovery. 
 
 Resources 
 
 Abzug, Robert H. GIs Remember: Liberating the Concentration Camps. Washington, DC: National Museum of American Jewish History, 1994. 
 
 Abzug, Robert H. Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. 
 
 Bridgman, Jon. End of the Holocaust: The Liberation of the Camps. Portland, OR: Areopagitica Press, 1990. 
 
 Chamberlin, Brewster S., and Marcia Feldman, editors. The Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945: Eyewitness Accounts of the Liberators. Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 1987. 
 
 Goodell, Stephen, and Kevin Mahoney. 1945: The Year of Liberation. Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1995. 
 
 Goodell, Stephen, and Susan D. Bachrach. Liberation 1945. Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1995.
– In late 1944, the UN War Crimes Commission indicted Adolf Hitler in secret, and it's far from the only clandestine thing related to the commission, which was commissioned before the actual United Nations was in 1945. As the Guardian reports, the secret material held in the UNWCC's archive for decades is now being made public. Previously, only researchers with government and the UN secretary general's approval could read the documents, many of which were smuggled out of Eastern Europe and used in subsequent Nazi trials. They'll be accessible online through the London-based Wiener Library, which describes itself as the "world's oldest Holocaust library." Its archivist says "it may well be that people will be able to rewrite crucial chapters of history using the new evidence." Among some of the details already making press: The Jewish News hails the "extraordinary detail" collected about Adolf Hitler's concentration camps, flagging an April 1944 description of how "the terracotta floors in the chambers… became very slippery when wet." Haaretz reports the material was removed from Eastern Europe beginning in 1943, which it interprets thusly: "the West knew of Nazi war crimes before discovering concentration camps." (Per the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the first major camp was found in 1944, with Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen liberated in 1945.) The Independent alters that date a hair and makes a more forceful assertion, writing, "The Allied Powers were aware of the scale of the Jewish Holocaust two-and-a-half years earlier than is generally assumed ... as early as December 1942, the US, UK and Soviet governments were aware that at least 2 million Jews had been murdered" and another 5 million were threatened. Another surprise from the archive, per the Guardian: Its documents show war crime tribunals were taking on crimes of rape and forced prostitution in the late 1940s, though it's popularly been thought the "legal innovation" arose after the 1990s Bosnian conflict. (In other World War II-related news, a tunnel under a death camp turned legend into reality.)