[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Fw: [BESS-GR] Russia reneges on returning promised 70000 German archived docs]

[gpvjem]

    The following was passed to me and in turn I am posting this to the GR-Pol-Vol List for information purposes.  Perhaps someone might know what region these documents are applicable to.

John Marsch

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      Subject  [BESS-GR] Russia reneges on returning promised 70000 German archived docs 
      Date:  Wed, 14 Jan 2004 12:37:54 -0600 
      From:  Michael Miller <Michael.Miller at NDSU.NODAK.EDU> 
      Reply-To:  Michael Miller <Michael.Miller at NDSU.NODAK.EDU> 
      To:  BESS-GR at LISTSERV.NODAK.EDU 



---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2004 20:38:52
+0200 From: Vera Beljakova <atacama at global.co.za> To:
GR-HERITAGE at LISTSERV.NODAK.EDU Subject: [GR-HERITAGE] Russia reneges on
returning promised 70 000 German
               archived docs

Moscow Times of today:
Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2004. Page 2

Report: Russia Backtracks on a Promise to Germany

The Moscow Times Russia has reneged on a promise to Germany to return
archive material that landed in Soviet hands during World War II, Der
Spiegel reported, citing a leaked communication sent by the Russian
Foreign Ministry to its German counterpart.

Russia has decided to declare the Rathenau Archives to be "compensatory
restitution" for damages inflicted by German forces in World War II, the
German weekly said in its current issue.

The Rathenau Archives are a collection of some 70,000 documents that
belonged to Weimar Republic Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, who was
assassinated in 1922 by far-right extremists in Berlin.

The documents were confiscated by the Soviets in 1945 and quickly
disappeared into a secret archive in Moscow.

In 1992, researchers were given access to the archives for a short time,
after which Germany asked for the documents to be returned.

In April 1997, then-President Boris Yeltsin returned 11 folders to
then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl as a sign of good will. Last year,
Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi promised that the archives would be
returned to Germany in full.

"The Rathenau Archives are much more valuable for us than for the
Russians," Wolfgang Bindseil, a spokesman at the German Embassy in
Moscow, said Tuesday.

"If a Russian icon were found in Germany, we would give it back without
discussion."

Bindseil declined to comment on the Der Spiegel report, noting that
there was no official communication from the Russian side regarding the
archive.

A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman also declined to comment.

forwarded by Vera Beljakova-Miller