Stealing archives : a way to rewrite history

http://cphpost.dk/news/nazi-sympathisers-try-to-rewrite-history-by-stealing-it.3149.html

In 2012, in the last days of October, Danish authorities arrested and put in custody two men suspected of the theft of Danish public archives from the World War II era. Indeed earlier in that month, members of the staff from Rigsarkivet, the Danish National Archives,  warned the police that documents have been missing. After a strict investigation, it was brought out that documents had been regularily and systematically stolen from the the Danish National Archives over the past ten years. Among the stolen documents were police reports, court documents but also personnal accounts and belongings. Most of those documents were related to a Danish soldier, Kaj Buchardt, who joined the German Army, the Wehrmacht, during the war and so fought alongside German soldiers, in particular against Russian forces in the East Front. It was reported that the two arrested men, who are known to be Nazi-sympathisers,  are also understood to have been personal acquaitance of Buchardt. The thefts were precisely organised : the documents, selected beforehand, were taken piece by piece, in order to not attract attention on the crime. There is apparently evidence that the thieves were planning to sell the robbed archives to one single person, giving the impression that they were acting on someone else's behalf. But the fact that the documents involved were all about the same individual could disclose an other motive to the crime : were the documents stolen in order to make them disappear from public knowledge ? May be the thieves wanted to hide the actions their friend had done during the war, and intended to destroy these archives. It seems they were trying to hide the fact that the soldier forsook the army to fight with the enemy, then that he joined it back at the end of the war.

This story shows that by stealing archives, some people intend more than getting money from their selling, they also want to change a part of History. Indeed, archives are the witnesses, and at the end the only one, of the past and the memory of humanity. Stealing archives to make them disappear is a way to change History, to delete the evidence that something happened, to erase its reality from the collective memory. That subject unfortunately leads us to think about the most terrible archives theft that could have been done in history : the wipeout of the documents which belonged to European Jews during the Seconde World War by the Nazis. As Hitler and his subordonates were killing Jews by millions, and so to speak making them disappear physically, they were also making them disapper virtually by stealing and destroying any document, in German administration or Jews personnal documents, that were mentioning their existence. It is quite horrible to think that archives, which represent and symbolise what humanity is and has done, can also be user by human beings as a kind of weapon to rewrite History at their convenience.

N. Hermant