BAD AROLSEN, Germany, May 18 (UPI) -- Newly opened archival records of Nazi Germany's prisoner files include precisely detailed records of executions, torture and forced labor.
Historians are poring over the 47 million files housed in a former Nazi SS barracks in Bad Arolsen since an 11-nation body overseeing the records voted Tuesday to open them to the public, The Independent reported Thursday.
One of the chilling records details how the commandant of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria made a "birthday present" to Adolf Hitler of the execution of 300 Russian prisoners on April 20, 1942.
The entry describes how beginning at 11:20 a.m., and every two minutes thereafter, prisoners were shot with a single pistol shot to the back of the neck, the newspaper said.
Since the war's end, the files have been used exclusively by the Red Cross International Tracing Service to establish the fate of the millions who went missing under Nazi rule.
