Thursday, August 26, 2010

National Archives to House Infamous Nazi Papers

By JOHN ROGERS, Associated Press Writer
Wed Aug 25, 3:53 am ET

SAN MARINO, Calif. – During the final days of World War II, as American soldiers were returning from Germany with swastika-inscribed helmets, flags and other Nazi memorabilia, Gen. George Patton was packing up his own set of souvenirs.

The legendary field commander took four pages of documents signed by Adolf Hitler that laid the legal framework for killing 6 million Jews — the so-called Nuremberg Laws.

On Wednesday, The Huntington Library, a sprawling complex of libraries, museums and botanical gardens in this leafy Los Angeles suburb, plans to hand over the documents to the government-run National Archives, thus concluding a 65-year-old odyssey.

The papers, which among other things rescinded the citizenship of German Jews and forbid them to marry non-Jews, are the only original pieces of Nuremberg trial evidence missing from the collection, said National Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper.

For the rest of the story: Click Here.

Note: This is very tangentially relevant to Melungeon studies in that the Nuremberg Laws were based in part on Virginia's 1924 Racial Integrity Act which negatively affected people of Melungeon descent in Virginia (among a great many others) and prompted Dr. Walter Plecker, Registrar of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics, to write to the State of Tennessee inquiring as to what it could tell him about Melungeon origins.

For more: Click Here and read not only that MHS Blog entry but those for the following two days as well.

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