THE last time Alex Moskovic, a retired television editor, saw his little brother and grandmother was on the platform of the railway station at Auschwitz in 1944, when he was 13. “They were told to get in the line on the left,” he recalled. “It was the line for the gas chamber.”

Moskovic was pushed with his mother, elder brother and father in another direction but they were soon split up. He discovered later that his brother was executed and his father died in another camp. “I have no idea what happened to Gittel, my mum,” he said.

More than six decades later the 75-year-old Moskovic, whose family came from Slova-kia, is expecting to find the answer. It lies in a vast store of Nazi documents that have been sealed from public view for the past 60 years but will soon be thrown open to the public.

“I hope I will get some information,” said Moskovic. “Why has it taken them this long?”

The extraordinary archive has an index of 17.5m names, among them Anne Frank, the Dutch diarist who died of typhus at 15 in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. It includes the original “Schindler’s list” of more than 1,100 Jews saved from death by Oskar Schindler, the Sudeten-German Catholic businessman who hired them to work in his factory.

Talks on how to speed up the unlocking of the archive among the 11 nations, including Britain, that control the millions of documents were held in the Nether-lands last week.

“The information is being digitalised,” said Reto Meister, head of the International Tracing Service that runs the archive in the German spa town of Bad Arolsen. “It is a lot of work.” He said some of the material would be ready for handing over to institutions such as the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washing-ton within two months: “Incarceration records, death lists, camp registries - everything to do with persecution should soon be ready for transfer.”

This warms the hearts of countless children and grandchildren of Holocaust victims trying to discover the details of their relatives’ fates. Ageing Holocaust victims are happy at last to have the chance to fill gaps in a macabre puzzle.

Some blamed Germany for hitherto blocking access to the files which consume 16 miles of shelf and cabinet space in a former SS barracks. “The Germans have never wanted to be known as the real bad guys,” said Moskovic, who lives in Florida. “This archive doesn’t help to make them look good.”

The Nazis’ compulsion to document every detail of their victims, from their background, place and date of birth to the number of lice in their hair, made the archive a useful tool for tracking missing persons and reuniting families after the war. This task was facilitated when the archive was placed by international treaty under the administration of the Tracing Service, part of the Red Cross, in 1955.

The documents, most of which were seized from liberated concentration camps, have also sometimes helped to validate compensation claims by Holocaust survivors and relatives.

Even so, a huge backlog of requests meant that applications often languished for years among the dust-covered filing cabinets, a frustrating obstacle for victims trying in the twilight of their lives to understand more about the persecution they suffered when younger.

“I was told it could take three years to get a reply,” said Jean Giraud, 81, who was arrested at a demonstration in Grenoble in 1944 and sent to Buchenwald and other labour camps. “At my age, that is far too long.”

Giraud, a retired electrician, believed that victims had a right to the paperwork surrounding their torment. “I want my deportation file and I am pretty sure it is in that archive,” he said. “These bits of the past should be [restored] to their owners.”

After years of pressure from survivors, the archive’s “governing commission” agreed in May last year to let in researchers.

That decision, however, has still to be ratified by some countries, including Britain - where it is expected to happen within weeks - and France, where a parliamentary debate is likely to be held up by presidential elections next month.

“We’re appealing to governments and their parliaments to ratify this agreement as quickly as possible,” said Gideon Taylor, of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, noting that some countries have raised questions about how to protect the privacy of people referred to in files.

“We are saying this is not an ordinary issue,” he added. “It is about the relevance of this archive to many people who are very elderly and for whom the information is so very important.”

Moskovic, the sole survivor in his family, believes that besides shedding light on the fate of his mother, the archive could also help to prove that his father and uncles held insurance policies with Assicurazioni Generali, an Italian company that is the subject of a class action in New York by thousands of Holocaust survivors.

The company recently offered a settlement but Moskovic was suspicious: “Why did they suddenly want to get this case out of the way just when the Bad Arolsen archive is about to open?”

Lawyers representing the company said they did not believe that the archive contained documents relating to insurance policies.

Serge Cwajgenbaum, secretary-general of the European Jewish Congress, said the files would be more relevant for “writing history” and lamented the fact that opening the archive had taken so long. He said the files could help historians to establish the truth and combat Holocaust denial.

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