A Long Delayed Gift For Holocaust Survivors

This next story has a mixture of happiness with heartbreak, as much of the information that is being made available publicly after 60 years, may well have brought families together, if it had been released many years ago. I feel a little bit of pleasure for the victims, and some shame due to my heritage, whenever I read anything about efforts to assist Holocaust survivors in finding what happened to their families. I say only a little bit of pleasure, because they have suffered so much, that empathy brings sorrow with the knowledge that comes from such efforts.
I am very proud of my German heritage (except when it is about the Holocaust), and My relatives in Germany during the War, were for the most part just "Good" Germans who did nothing to help or hinder Jews, some who were soldiers, were just fighting for "their" country, but there was at least one confirmed SS sergeant, in our family, who participated in the killings. It is that bit of family "relations" that makes me feel bad, for not just the murdered, but for the survivors, who lost everything, and everyone, because of the actions of this loathsome person, and by the inactions of my other relatives. And while they were distant relatives I cannot disavow them, while still avowing the ancestry that I do admire, such as Johannes Kepler the Astronomer, whose Kepler's Three Laws of Motion, are still taught in schools.

Anyway~~ on to this interesting story from Yahoo News, which was written by Melissa Eddy of the Associated Press, titled, Lost in the Holocaust: experts plumb newly opened archive~~
A mother and child separated. A father's war wound. An uncle's name on a list.

The unrelated and disparate items are among the discoveries made by 40 Jewish genealogists who spent the past week plumbing a trove of Nazi documents made public after 60 years.

For genealogists of Jewish families, the Holocaust is both a tragedy and a black hole, because so many of the 6 million Jewish victims disappeared without a trace. For years, researchers hoping to fill the gaps have longed to dive into the more than 50 million documents held in this German spa town and entrusted to the International Tracing Service, or ITS.

LINK TO FULL STORY AND RESOURCES