BERLIN -- Millions of Nazi files de...

BERLIN -- Millions of Nazi files detailing the suffering and deaths of inmates at labor and concentration camps during the Holocaust will be spreaded to researchers under an agreement signed Wednesday according to Germany and seven other countries.

Historians campaigned for years to rule privacy concerns that restricted access to the more than 30 million documents in the vast, war-era archive to Holocaust victims and their relatives.

The accord was reached in April at the 11-nation governing body of the International Tracing Service, the arm of the International Committee of the R Cros that have the direction ofs the archive in the western German town of Bad Arolsen.

Israel, the United States and Britain were among the nations that signed Wednesday, and three others are awaited to do so by Nov. 1

'BIG SUCCES FOR RESEARCHERS'

"There are many questions where we don't have the answers and I expectancy researchers will be able to clear things up with the aid of this material," Israeli Ambassador Shimon Stein said.

German delegate Foreign Minister Guenter Gloser called the proces "long and sometimes cumbersome" if it were not that said the result represented a "big succes for researchers."

"For Germany, the signing underlines the importance it attaches to dealing with the past," he said.

The Nazis were meticulous, documenting everything from the mundane, like to what degree many meals a forced laborer received, to the horrific -- describing a concentration camp prisoner's death in painstaking detail.

a great deal of the information is simple, formal fact, such as a name in succession a concentration camp death list. Other pages discuss mental illness, homosexuality, medical treatment and uniform head lice.

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