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This segment was originally broadcast on Dec. 17, 2006. It was updated on June 21, 2007.

For the first time, secrets of the Nazi Holocaust that have been hidden away for more than 60 years are finally being made available to the public. We’re not talking about a missing filing cabinet – we’re talking about thousands of filing cabinets, holding 50 million pages. It’s Hitler’s secret archive.

The Nazis were famous for record keeping but what 60 Minutes found ran from the bizarre to the horrifying. This Holocaust history was discovered by the Allies in dozens of concentration camps, as Germany fell in the spring of 1945.

As correspondent Scott Pelley reports, the documents were taken to a town in the middle of Germany, called Bad Arolsen, where they were sorted, filed and locked way, never to be seen by the public until now.

The storerooms are immense: 16 miles of shelves holding the stories of 17 million victims – not only Jews, but slave laborers, political prisoners and homosexuals. To open the files is to see the Holocaust staring back like it was yesterday: strange pink Gestapo arrest warrants as lethal as a death sentence, jewelry lost as freedom ended at the gates of an extermination camp. Time stopped here in 1945.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States and France have signed an accord that will compensate thousands of Holocaust survivors and their families who were deported to concentration camps by France’s state rail company during Nazi occupation.

At a State Department ceremony Monday, French human rights ambassador Patrizianna Sparacino-Thiellay said the agreement will cover thousands of survivors, their spouses or heirs in the U.S. who have not been covered by earlier compensation funds.

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Seventy-four years after Arthur Rauner was murdered in Auschwitz, offspring travel from Israel to attend emotional ceremony commemorating him.

The town of Hargesheim, population 3,000, is about an hour’s drive from Frankfurt. The Rauner family’s roots there go back about 120 years, when Michael Rauner settled in town after fighting against the French in the German army. He was buried in the Jewish cemetery that is still preserved in the village.

Arthur Rauner, Michael’s son, continued living with his wife Augusta in the family home. Arthur opened a small factory that produced shoe polish. When the Nazis came to power, the couple’s four children decided to escape Germany and came to Israel.

“Hugo, my father, escaped right after Kristallnacht, in 1938,” said Osnat Lester, Arthur and Augusta’s granddaughter. “He told his parents he would pick them up to go to Israel and asked them to wait for him beneath the town clock on a certain day, but when he arrived, the neighbors told him that the Nazis already took them.”

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CBS News) Seventy years ago today — October 6, 1943 — a group of rabbis and Jewish war veterans staged a small march in Washington to draw public attention to the Holocaust then taking place across Nazi-occupied Europe. We are still learning more about just what happened, both from archives and from the personal witness of those who somehow survived. Our Cover Story is reported now by Lee Cowan:

She remembers it vividly: “The train arrives, people getting out, lining up on the platform, and pretty soon they will be told, ‘Men to one side and women to the other.”

To talk with Irene Weiss is to touch the Holocaust in a truly personal way.

She’s a survivor, and yet — some seven decades later — she can barely believe it had actually happened.

“At first, this was pretty hard to talk about, wasn’t it?” Cowan asked.

“Yes. It was extremely difficult. And then I realized that we have to share the story. We can’t let people forget it.”

She was just 13 when the boxcar carrying her and her family arrived at Auschwitz on that all-too-busy platform.

Weiss knew little of what would come of her when the doors of the cattle car opened: “They were barking orders to get out. My father and 16-year-old brother lined up with the other men and boys, and the women and children and elderly in another line.”

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I looked out at life with Holocaust eyes
And what better did I know that I had been
looking through the lens of guilt and affliction,
Seeing life amiss and askew through my Holocaust guilt,
This fatal flaw was burning in my eyes
and how it lay siege to my Jewish heart,
A Greek tragedy in the making all of these years,
The guilt rose from deeply sealed vaults
inside my Jewish eyes and heart,
I could not help but see life through my Holocaust eyes,
Until these Holocaust pangs smoldered and burned
its acrid smoke in my eye sockets,
I peeled away its painful gauze and ace bandages,
My eyes had once lamented over the Holocaust afflictions,
But now I could see with clarion eyes and feel anew
with my Jewish heart by virtue of Holocaust healing balm,
As it clarified the lens, fluid and muscles of my eyes,
And now this healing balm paved a shimmering path within me,
For my Jewish heart to emerge and then shine its splendor
outwards on straight and forward path of life.

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An international team of researchers launched a study of Holocaust-era killing sites in the Kremenets region in western Ukraine.

The project was initiated this year by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA, whose April report on killing sites ruled out conducting archeological digs in such locales as this violates Jewish religious laws.

The study team, led by Meylakh Sheykhet, Ukraine director for the Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union, earlier this month used geophysical imaging to delineate an area where in 1942 Nazi soldiers buried thousands of Jews they had shot. Ukraine has thousands of killing sites of various sizes.

“The actual place where they are buried is hard to locate because the designated place where we are searching was demarcated based on testimonies,” said Ksenya Bondar, a geologist from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kiev, who participated in the survey. “We need to scan the area strip by strip.”
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Thousands of Holocaust victims transported to Nazi concentration camps by a French railway company will be entitled to compensation.

France and the US have agreed a £40 million ($60 million) settlement fund, that will be financed by the French Government.

Survivors who were deported by France’s state rail company SNCF during World War II will be able to make a claim.

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The rulings of Rabbi Meir Mazuz provide a glimpse into his positions: He encourages haredi soldiers to refuse orders to evacuate settlements and allows tax evasion for yeshiva students.

“Why did the terrible Holocaust nearly pass over the Sephardim? It is the fruit of the holy Torah’s education,” said Rabbi Meir Mazuz, the spiritual leader of the HaAm Itanu party. Eli Yishai’s “teacher” is considered one of the most senior rabbis among Sephardic ultra-Orthodox, but he is less well-known to the wider public. His religious rulings therefore allow a glimpse into his attitude towards the state’s law, his controversial opinions, and his positions that are deeply rooted in the right-wing.

The book “Makor Ne’eman” (2010), published by his students, includes short and succinct halacha answers Rabbi Mazuz wrote to those who turned to him with different matters. Question number 958 was: “Some believe Ashkenazi education is better than Sephardic education. Is there truth to that belief?”

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News coverage discusses the defense strategy of attorney Robert Servatius as he represents Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi SS officer who organized Adolf Hitler’s “‘final solution of the Jewish question'” and who was scheduled to stand trial in Israel on April 11, 1961, for his crimes during World War II.

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PEOPLE from across Derby’s various religious and cultural groups will come together to mark Holocaust Memorial Day later this month.

January 27 is the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.

Now officially designated Holocaust Memorial Day, it is the day on which not only the millions of people murdered during the Holocaust under Nazi persecution are remembered but also those who have died in subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.

This year, 70 specially designed candles will be lit with Derby being chosen as one of the locations.

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