The American Red Cross has opened a center in Baltimore that will provide access to documents in Germany bearing the names of about 400,000 people who died or were interned in Nazi concentration and forced labor camps during World War II.
The Holocaust and War Victims Tracing and Information Center, in the local Red Cross office in northwest Baltimore, will serve as a national clearing house for Americans who want to learn the fates of friends and relatives who perished or were held in the camps.
Copies of the documents have been made available by the Soviet Union to a Red Cross agency in West Germany. The Soviet army recovered the original documents during the liberation of the camps at war's end.
People can apply immediately to the Baltimore center for information, said Linda Klein, media manager for the Central Maryland Chapter of the American Red Cross.
Emmy Mogilensky of Pikesville, who was present at the opening of the center yesterday, knows the value of the documents. From 1942 to 1946, Mogilensky, a German-Jewish teen-ager, searched for her parents from whom she was separated in the early days of World War II when she was shipped to England.
Her search ended in June 1946 when the Red Cross told her that her parents had died in a concentration camp.
With the documents made available by the Soviet Union, the search may end for thousands like Mogilensky.
Throughout the United States, applicants can complete inquiry forms at local Red Cross offices. The requests will be sent to the Baltimore center, where two staff workers and volunteers they supervise will translate the requests into German and forward them to the International Tracing Service, the Red Cross agency in Arolsen, West Germany, where the copies of the documents are being stored.
The documents include 46 Sterbebucher -- or "death books" - containing about 70,000 death certificates from the Auschwitz camp. The Soviets also have provided access to the names of about 130,000 people captured by the Germans for forced labor and about 200,000 internees of Sachsenhausen, Gross Rosen, Buchenwald and other concentration camps.
The Red Cross has cautioned that each search is expected to absorb considerable time. Certification of a death could take several months, while verifying a forced labor situation could take even longer.
