Germany supports opening of Nazi archive

An international agreement to unseal a long-closed archive of Nazi concentration camp documents for scholarship has won crucial endorsement from Germany, giving the accord a majority among the 11 nations overseeing the treasure of historical documents. The German Embassy in Washington announced Thursday that President Horst Koehler signed the ratification papers April 13, adopting amendments to the 1955 treaties governing the archive. The storehouse of 30 million to 50 million pages is administered by the International Tracing Service, an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross.