Nations agree to open up German Nazi archive

A German archive containing millions of documents detailing Nazi crimes during World War Two will be opened to historians and Holocaust scholars for the first time, officials said on Wednesday.

n an official ceremony to mark the decision, Germany's junior minister for foreign affairs, Guenter Gloser, welcomed the decision by his own country and the 10 other nations who oversee the archive's administration to open up the files for research.

"With the decision to change the protocol (governing the archive) we are bringing a long process to an end," Gloser said, noting that Germany had overcome its difficulties on reconciling the release of the data with its tough privacy laws.

The archive, housed in the west German town of Bad Arolsen, is the world's biggest collection of documents relating to the Second World War and Hitler's National Socialist party.

It contains up to 50 million documents on some 17 million individuals and is expected to shed new light on the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews across Europe were murdered.