Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, June 22, 1995                   TAG: 9506220049
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: FRANKFURT, GERMANY                                LENGTH: Medium

GESTAPO KEPT DEATH RECORDS

The macabre, meticulous bureaucracy of mass murder became public knowledge Wednesday with publication of the ``Death Books From Auschwitz.''

It is the first widely available listing of people killed at the Nazi death camp.

The SS officers who ran Auschwitz detailed the doomed prisoners' births, home towns and family records, along with the death dates.

They lied about the cause of death.

``The Gestapo constructed these death book pages to look like normal municipal records of people who happened to have died on Barracks Street in the town of Auschwitz,'' wrote editors Sibylle Goldmann and Jan Parcer in the introduction.

The three-volume set holds ``the death records of murdered prisoners, based on the partially preserved original death books which the Auschwitz concentration camp authorities compiled with incredible meticulousness,'' wrote Wladyslaw Bartoszewski - Poland's foreign minister and an Auschwitz survivor - in the foreword.

The Nazis listed 400,000 prisoners as having been kept in the camp, but more than 1 million, most of them Jews, were taken directly from the trains to the gas chambers, their names never recorded.

The SS commanders did record the names of 69,000 people who died at the camp.

The records were used in 1964 in the prosecution of war criminals, but were buried in KGB archives in Moscow until 1991.

In February of that year, researchers from the Auschwitz Museum, at the site of the former concentration camp in southern Poland, were granted permission from Soviet authorities to examine them.

Within a year, the new Russian authorities had handed over the documents.