2007 Press Releases
U.S. Special Envoy For Holocaust Issues On First Visit To Greece
October 24, 2007
Making his first visit to Greece since assuming his duties as the U.S. Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues in August 2006, Ambassador J. Christian Kennedy arrived in Athens on October 19 and will travel to Thessaloniki on October 24. The focus of his trip was Greece’s ratification of May 2006 amendments related to wider distribution of the International Tracing Service archive located at Bad Arolsen, Germany. Greece’s newly elected Parliament ratified the amendments last night by unanimous consent in what was its first approval of a piece of final legislation since taking office in September. “I want to congratulate the Greek parliament,” said Kennedy, “and to note that with this historic vote, all 11 countries have completed their approval process.” The U.S. Special Envoy is also meeting with Greek government officials and institutions as well as with leaders of the Jewish community in Athens and Thessaloniki about Holocaust education and remembrance.
At its May 2006 meeting in Luxembourg, the eleven member-states of the International Tracing Service (ITS) Commission adopted amendments to the founding agreements to permit each member-state to receive a digitized copy of virtually the entire Bad Arolsen archive. This archive is a huge and unique collection totaling approximately thirty million pages of pre-war, WWII and post-war detention, concentration camp, labor and displaced persons records. Commission member states would be able to make copies available, under their respective national privacy laws, to researchers and to Holocaust survivors and their families. The amendments also provide for researchers to have direct access to the archives in Bad Arolsen. In addition to the United States and Greece, the ITS Commission is comprised of Belgium, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, and the United Kingdom.