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London library makes WWII war crime searches easier

LONDON — Holocaust denial just got a little harder.

The Wiener Library for the Study of Holocaust & Genocide is making the United Nations’ files on World War II war crimes more accessible by allowing the general public to search an online catalog of the documents for the first time last Friday.

People will still have to visit the library in Lon-don or the U.S. Holocaust Museum to read the actual files.

The move is expected to increase interest in the archives of the United Nations War Crimes Commission, including the names of some 37,000 people identified as war criminals and security suspects. The commission operated in 1943-1949, but access to its records was restricted for political reasons in the early days of the Cold War.

“This is a whole hardware store of nails to hammer into the coffin of Holocaust denial,” said Dan Plesch, director of the Centre for Interna-tional Studies and Diplo-macy at SOAS University of London. “It’s the first time it is practically accessible to the general public as the commission initially intended.”

Plesch and other researchers campaigned for the U.N. to open access to the files, which he used to write the book “Human Rights After Hitler.” In 2014, the U.S. Holocaust Museum made the archive freely available at its reading room in Washington. Prior to that, the records had been largely locked away.

The documents detail Allied efforts to prosecute thousands of alleged Nazi and Japanese war criminals.

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