Historic Documents on Operation Barbarossa Discovered in US Garbage Bag
News News blog
In a suburb of Philadelphia in the USA, investigators made a sensational find in 1999: In garbage bags, explosive historical documents from the Nazi era were stored, including documents on Operation Barbarossa, Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
The documents come from the possession of Robert M.W. Kempner, a German lawyer of Jewish origin who emigrated to the USA. Kempner was one of the chief prosecutors at the Nuremberg war crimes trials after World War II. Apparently, after the trials concluded, he took original pieces of evidence on his own authority and smuggled them to the USA.
After Kempner's death in 1993, the documents were forgotten. They were stored for years unnoticed in his former house in Lansdowne near Philadelphia until the building was sold and cleared out. During this process, the historical treasures resurfaced among family documents in garbage bags.
The collection includes, among other things, the war diary of the "Oldenburg Working Group" with plans for the attack on the Soviet Union. Documents from the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories on war crimes and the Holocaust are also included.
Why Kempner set the documents aside is unclear. He may have wanted to prevent the documents from being lost. However, due to improper storage, the papers partially deteriorated. For historical research, it would have been better if Kempner had left them to official archives.
Now the find will be divided between the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the National Archives, and a private dealer. Unfortunately, parts of the collection will also end up on the market for Nazi memorabilia. Despite Kempner's questionable actions, the documents are of great historical value for research on World War II and the National Socialist terror regime.
