(Smithsonian Magazine) At the end of World War II, the Red Army grabbed documents and souvenirs from German military installations around Berlin. Much of that material was placed in military archives behind the Iron Curtain and was inaccessible to researchers from the West. But in recent years, the Russians have opened some of their archives and digitized many of their documents. Recently, one set of documents of particular importance came to light: 1,000 pages of diary entries from Heinrich Himmler, considered Hitler’s number two and the architect of the Holocaust.
According to Ben Knight at Deutsche Welle, the diaries were discovered in Russian military archives in Podolsk, a suburb of Moscow in 2013. The typed diary entries were put together each day by Himmler’s assistants. Knight writes that the new discovery covers the years 1937-1938 and 1944-1945. A previous diary covering 1941-1942 was discovered in 1990. These new documents are slated for publication by the Moscow-based German Historical Institute next year.