A historian of the Holocaust called the records’ destruction “catastrophic.”

According to the Hamburg Morgen Post newspaper, the state cultural ministry is defending the decision by the archive’s director, Udo Schäfer, to destroy an estimated 1 million death certificates dating from 1876 to 1953.

But even Schäfer admits he made a mistake. In his own defense, he explained to the paper that “almost all the information” contained in the files is found in other archived documents, like death registries and in files from jails or hospitals.

Schäfer, who has directed the archive since 2001, now says he should have considered that historians and other scholars have cited the documents in their publications — and that these sources no longer exist. He said he would not make the same decision today.

Historian Sybille Baumbach, who has worked on reconstructing the life stories of Jewish Holocaust victims for the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel, told reporters that the death certificates contained information that — if recorded elsewhere at all — would be difficult to find, such as cause of death and the name and signature of the doctor who made the determination. ...