Hitler's Nuremberg Laws End Convoluted Journey at National Archives

WASHINGTON, Oct. 6, 2010— -- Martin Dannenberg, an Army intelligence officer, was sitting in a German beer hall in April 1945 when a local man approached him, asking for help getting out of the war-torn country. In exchange, he promised him something that would be highly valuable to the Americans.

Intrigued, Dannenberg followed the man he called Uncle Hans to a bank vault in the town of Eichstatt, where he found a swastika-embossed envelope containing four of the most symbolic records from the war: original copies of the Nuremberg Laws.

The laws, which were signed by Adolf Hitler 75 years ago last month, outlawed marriages and sex between Jews and citizens of "German blood;" stripped Jews of their German citizenship; and established the swastika as the official flag of the Third Reich.

They established the legal underpinnings for marginalization of Jews and ultimately set into motion the Holocaust, historians say.

Dannenberg, under orders from Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to gather Nazi records and submit them for use in the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, photographed the documents with his Minox spy camera and gave them to his superior, Gen. George S. Patton.

But then the documents -- the only surviving original copies -- went missing and never made it into prosecutors' hands for use during the trials or into the collection of Nazi records now held in the U.S. National Archives. For Dannenberg, the discovery became little more than a personal memory which he didn't have the evidence to prove.

The Nuremberg Laws surfaced 54 years later at a small museum in San Marino, California, where Patton had deposited them for his personal safekeeping. And they were finally transferred this summer to the U.S. National Archives in Washington. Today, they were put on display for the first time.

While Dannenberg didn't survive to see the transfer of the records he first found – he died in August at age 94 – his family, who had been regaled for decades with his tale of the discovery, said he would be thrilled.

"We never saw the documents but we believed him," said Dannenberg's son, Richard, of his father's war story. "I'm sure he knows that they're here now. He would be proud."