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Records/Archives in the News Part 03 01/23/00
Records/Archives in the News r000105a
There are 4 stories in this posting.
MSNBC.com 1/5/99
Medical records secured
Bergen Record 1/5/00
Oakland mayor in tug of war over files
Washington Post 1/5/00
Epilogue to a story of Nazi-looted books
Spokane Spokesman Review 1/5/00
Ada County (Idaho) sues firm over records system
________________________________________________________________
MSNBC.com 1/5/99
Medical records secured
<snip>
Birmingham, Al January 5, 2000 -- The records, which belong to Birmingham
Podiatry, PC have been picked up and secured. They hired a contractor to go
to the dump site and secure the documents, which contain patient?s social
security numbers and prescriptions receipts.
?We feel what happened was either through a burglary-type situation, or
somebody who was supposed to dispose of them in a professional manner, didn?t
quite do their job. We don?t know and we?re investigating ourselves,? said
Birmingham Podiatry?s Dr. Walter Clark.
There was a shocking discovery in Shelby County on Tuesday. Medical records,
x-rays and even prescriptions of patients in the care of a Birmingham area
podiatrist group were found on the side of a road.
Medical files of patients are supposed to stay locked up, considered
confidential. But, hundreds of files were found literally blowing away in the
wind, along-side a Shelby County road.
?I?m trying to think this out and trying to think of a reason for this to
happen and there is not a reason for this to happen,? said podiatrist
patient, Mona Wear. Her medical files were one of many found on the side of
the road.
These files are more than road-side litter, they are the records of people?s
lives, confidential material, and facts given to doctors by patients. Now, it
is all sitting on public land.
<SNIP>
<SNIP>
NBC 13 found the site of the records dump after a concerned viewer contacted
us. What were found was medical records, complete with patient?s names, home
addresses, social security numbers and copies of insurance cards dating from
1986 to 1996.
Most of the material bears the letterhead from Birmingham Podiatry, P.C.
Their company name appears on hundreds of patient background charts. So, NBC
13 went to their southside Birmingham office, armed with several patient
files we found and asked them how this happened.
?I think Birmingham Podiatrist should be held responsible for this, because
this is their private records. There should not be anything public about
this. It is appalling to think that any information like this can go out.
What if someone wanted to take my information and use my credit? They have
everything they need to have to use my credit,? said Wear.
>SNIP>
<SNIP>
Dr. Carden Johnson is a Medical Society member who said his group does not
regulate podiatrists, but they do deal with issues of ethics.
?Confidentiality is paramount. Dumping records breaks confidentiality. So
when records are destroyed, we want them destroyed and we want someone to
tell us that they have destroyed these records, so confidentiality is not
invaded,? said Dr. Johnson.
NBC 13 contacted Shelby County authorities to let them know more of these
records are out there. We want to emphasize doctors at Birmingham Podiatry
said these records were supposed to be shredded, or they were stolen.
<SNIP>
_________________________________________________________________
Bergen Record 1/5/00
Oakland mayor in tug of war over files
by Pia Sarkar
<SNIP>
OAKLAND?The new year has gotten off to a rocky start, with the incoming mayor
accusing the outgoing mayor of trying to leave office with files that do not
belong to him.
Mayor Robert Piccoli announced at his inauguration Sunday that former Mayor
J. Peter Kendall had tried to make off with 15 boxes of public documents that
should have stayed in Borough Hall.
Piccoli has had the boxes brought back to Borough Hall, where they have
remained since Monday. But Kendall insists that the documents in the boxes
are his, and he has filed a complaint with the Police Department against
Piccoli, accusing him of ?theft of personal property.?
A probable cause hearing has been set for Thursday.
?I really believe it was a misunderstanding of what he could take and what he
couldn?t take,? Piccoli said of Kendall. Among the files are documents
regarding the Ramapo River Reserve?a controversial housing development?as
well as paperwork on flood control, grant applications, and letters from
residents, Piccoli said.
Kendall said little about the incident, but firmly maintained that the files
are his, not the borough?s.
He said that all public documents are kept and maintained by the borough
clerk and borough administrator, not the mayor.
?The mayor keeps no official files,? he said. The documents that he cleared
out of his office last Thursday ?were all my personal files from 15 years.?
Kendall would not comment further. But Piccoli described the events as
follows:
On Thursday, as Kendall was cleaning out his office, he cut his hand and had
to go to a hospital for stitches. From there he called a Department of Public
Works employee and asked him to collect the 15 boxes he had left behind in
Borough Hall and take them to the DPW building, where he planned to pick them
up at a later date.
As the DPW worker was collecting the boxes, he noticed files that he
suspected belonged to the borough. The worker, in turn, called Piccoli.
Piccoli drove to the DPW building, where the boxes had by then been
transferred. He piled the boxes in his van and took them to his home.
Later that day he received a phone call from Kendall demanding that the files
be returned to him. Piccoli refused. The next day, Piccoli went through the
files himself and picked out what he believed to be Kendall?s personal
belongings. He sent those belongings to Kendall?in an inch-thick envelope,
Kendall says?and the rest of the files to Borough Hall.
Friday evening, Kendall pressed theft charges against Piccoli. On Sunday,
during the swearing-in of the mayor and council, Piccoli told the audience
what had transpired.
?It was information that had to go out?I wanted the public to know,? Piccoli
said. ?I thought it was better to err on the side of open communication.?
Councilman Donald T. Burns, who, like Kendall, is a Republican, said he
thought the move was completely out of line.
<SNIP>
<SNIP>
Burns said that if Piccoli believed the files belonged to the borough and not
Kendall, ?he should have gotten the Police Department to impound the files.?
Even worse, Burns said, Piccoli had not yet been sworn in as mayor when he
took Kendall?s files back to his own house.
?I think the fact that he just put them into his car is an abuse of power
that he didn?t even have at the time.?
<SNIP>
_________________________________________________________________
Washington Post 1/5/00
Epilogue to a story of Nazi-looted books
Library of Congress trove of war propaganda included many stolen Jewish works
by Michael Dobbs
<SNIP>
For the Library of Congress representatives assigned to U.S. military
intelligence at the end of World War II, it was the most exciting adventure
of their lives, the closest they would come to actual combat. They were men
with a mission: to scour occupied Germany for Nazi propaganda and fill in the
gaps of the great American book collections.
After years spent cataloguing books and toiling in musty archives, the
American librarians suddenly found themselves interrogating Nazi book
collectors and confiscating enemy literature. Wearing military uniforms and
serving as part of the occupying force, the dozen or so men of the Library of
Congress Mission to Europe managed to ship nearly 1 million books back to
Washington in a little over a year.
But now?more than half a century later?the U.S. Army captain who handed over
confiscated Nazi materials to the mission says it is ?undeniable? that some
of the books that ended up in Washington were not mere Nazi propaganda.
Rather, they had been looted from Jewish homes, libraries or synagogues by
the Nazis. In recent weeks, investigators from the Department of Justice, a
presidential commission on Holocaust-era assets and half a dozen private
researchers have been grappling with the unsettling notion that these books
are sitting unacknowledged on the shelves of the Library of Congress and
other American libraries.
?The problem was that the Nazis screwed up all of Europe,? says Seymour
Pomrenze, a former U.S. government archivist who was in charge of a U.S. Army
unit that tried to restore looted books to their communities after the war.
?In some cases, when the books were marked, that was fine. We gave them back
to the country [of origin]. But this was often not the case.? He adds that it
was ?logistically impossible? to examine every crate shipped to Washington
for evidence of Jewish loot.
The disputed books were part of the ?working library? of a Nazi institute
engaged in pseudo-scientific research into the ?Jewish problem? that was
seized by the U.S. Army and shipped to the Library of Congress in 382 crates,
starting in March 1946. In addition, records show that the library received
several thousand books in 1949 with the approval of Jewish refugee
organizations as part of a general distribution of ?non-traceable? Nazi loot.
The present search for Nazi-looted books has attracted much less public
attention than a parallel hunt for gold and art treasures stolen by the Nazis
from mainly Jewish collectors, which had greater financial value. Yet it goes
to the heart of the Nazi program of cultural extermination.
<SNIP>
<SNIP>
After the war, these and several million other Jewish books fell into the
hands of the victorious U.S. Army, along with vast mounds of captured Nazi
documents and propaganda material. At first, there was little supervision of
the allied recovery effort. When Sargent Child, newly appointed archives
adviser to U.S. military commander Lucius Clay, arrived on the scene in
September 1945, four months after V-E Day, he was struck by the phenomenon of
American soldiers wandering through Germany ?liberating books.?
?I now have a better appreciation of the old stories about what the Yankees
took from the South,? Child wrote the Librarian of Congress, Luther Evans.
?Their grandsons and those grandsons of the Rebs are following the old
pattern.?
By early 1946, however, the U.S. Army had embarked on an organized effort to
repatriate some 3 million books that had been looted by the Nazis. They
collected the loot in a warehouse in the town of Offenbach, just outside
Frankfurt, under the control of Pomrenze. The Offenbach building had itself
been confiscated from the chemicals conglomerate, I.G. Farben, that had
manufactured the gas used at Auschwitz and other concentration camps.
The restitution effort coincided with a massive purchasing and collection
drive by a consortium of American libraries led by the Library of Congress,
which had been cut off from German materials for more than six years. Anxious
to fill these gaps, the library dispatched a mission to Germany, armed with
authority to requisition suspected Nazi collections.
<SNIP>
<SNIP>
To bolster their authority, the Library of Congress representatives were
given the rank and privileges of junior officers. ?It is important? to wear
uniforms, chief of mission Reuben Peiss cabled Washington in October 1945.
?You get into all kinds of facilities with them and all kinds of trouble
without them.? In their communications back home, mission members adopted
military jargon, describing Nazi libraries as ?targets? and Germany as ?the
theater.?
Many of the books shipped back to Washington by the Library of Congress
Mission were purchased legitimately from German dealers. But others were
confiscated from German libraries on the pretext?not always justified,
according to Eckert and other researchers?of seizing ?Nazi propaganda.? Some
of this confiscated material, researchers believe, was probably looted from
Jewish collections.
Library of Congress records show that Pomrenze and his successors authorized
the transfer of 382 crates of material, containing 77,000 items, from the
Rosenberg Institute in Frankfurt to the Library of Congress between March and
September 1946. Many of the 20,000 or so books in the institute?s ?working
library? had come from ?non-tainted? sources, including the Frankfurt public
library. But researchers now believe that the library?like other Nazi
collections?also contained looted Jewish books.
In accepting the Rosenberg material, Library of Congress representatives
signed statements declaring that the shipments did not include Nazi-looted
books ?from countries other than Germany which would be subject to normal
restitution procedures.? But Pomrenze, who was in charge of the Offenbach
depot at the time, says that it was impossible to completely separate the
looted from the non-looted material. Many of the books bore no marks that
would permit sorters to identify owners.
Library of Congress records fail to clearly identify the nature of the 1946
shipments from Offenbach, describing them as books on politics, law and ?the
Jewish question? in German, French and Italian, according to a document first
discovered by Kenneth Alford, an amateur historian who has studied the
question of Nazi loot.
How to dispose of the non-traceable Jewish books stored at Offenbach became a
hot political issue, with Jewish organizations in America and Palestine
staking rival claims. Some members of the Library of Congress Mission favored
shipping the loot back to the United States. Librarian Evans did his best to
steer clear of the controversy, instructing subordinates ?not to touch? the
heirless material until an amicable settlement could be reached.
<SNIP>
<SNIP>
In the end, a nonprofit organization called Jewish Cultural Reconstruction
was given responsibility for distributing the half million books left behind
after the Offenbach operation closed down in 1949. Many of the books were
sent to the newly established state of Israel. According to JCR records,
American institutions received a total of 158,111 books, of which 5,708 went
to the Library of Congress.
Tracing what happened to the JCR books?and the ones received earlier from the
Rosenberg Institute?is difficult. The Library of Congress did not keep track
of the books that it received from Offenbach, although the JCR books were
marked with a sticker inside the back cover. Some were processed into the
library?s own collections; others were distributed to sister institutions
around the country.
Last fall, the Justice Department?s Office of Special Investigations
completed a report largely exonerating the Library of Congress, and
concluding that it had made a good-faith effort to screen the shipments from
Offenbach for ?restitutable? books. That in turn triggered an investigation
by the U.S. Presidential Commission on Holocaust Era Assets, which has yet to
publish its findings.
More than half a century after the war, most of the original owners of the
looted books are dead. Returning the books has become a practical
impossibility, even supposing that the owners could be identified and traced.
But some researchers believe the library could have done more to identify and
catalogue the books.
David Moore, an acquisitions assistant at the Library of Congress who has
studied the Offenbach records, says there should be a special entry in the
library?s electronic catalogue for books received from Offenbach. ?These
books belong to people who were murdered in the camps. If they are part of
our collection, we should identify them.?
<SNIP>
________________________________________________________________
Spokane Spokesman Review 1/5/00
Ada County (Idaho) sues firm over records system
Associated Press
<SNIP>
Ada County officials have filed a lawsuit seeking more than $5 million in
damages over an allegedly faulty computerized records system.
The breach-of-contract complaint filed in 4th District Court seeks the refund
of the nearly $2.1 million paid for the Altaris Records Management system and
$3.3 million in a performance bond from the vendor, PRC Public Sector Inc. of
Reston, Va., and the bond holder, Pennsylvania-based Reliance Insurance Co.
?The product we thought we bought is not the product we have,? Ada County
Commission Chairman Roger Simmons said Monday.
PRC representatives could not be reached for comment, but in a letter to the
county PRC President Glen ?Skip? Funk said the county had failed to work with
the company.
The county began using the system in July after five years of development.
It was supposed to link police officers and other emergency personnel with
criminal justice systems and other city of Boise and Ada County computer
files. But officers almost immediately began complaining that they were not
getting good information in the format they needed in the field.
Ada County Sheriff Vaughn Killeen said the county tried to work with PRC, and
eventually got portions of the system to work. But PRC rejected the county?s
Dec. 2 demand to fix the system?s lingering glitches, saying the county and
area cities had received what they bought in 1994, county officials said.
?We feel the system we got is not a functional system,? Killeen said. ?It
impacts all of public safety in Ada County.?
<SNIP>
PETER A. KURILECZ CRM, CA
PAKURILECZ@AOL.COM
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