WASHINGTON — Robert Wolfe, who for more than three decades was a chief custodian and scholar of the millions of German documents seized during World War II and stored at the National Archives, a collection that he helped index and preserve for generations of researchers, died Dec. 9 at a hospital in Alexandria, Virginia. He was 93.
The cause was respiratory failure, his son Marc Wolfe said.
Few people in the world knew more about the paper trail of the Third Reich than Wolfe, a son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and an Army veteran of the Pacific and European theaters of the Second World War. Trained as a historian, he became a leader among the postwar archivists who took on the enormous job of cataloging and copying the military and government documents captured in Adolf Hitler’s Germany.
Wolfe “provided for a whole generation or two of historians access to this remarkable trove of records that fell into Allied hands,” said David Marwell, a noted investigator of Nazi war crimes and director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. “There was no one who appreciated the importance of documents more than Bob Wolfe, and the importance of [their] being available and well described.”
Wolfe’s efforts began in the early 1960s at the old torpedo factory in Alexandria, a complex that today is an arts center. There, after the war, the United States had stored for intelligence-gathering and historical purposes tens of millions of German documents.
In a project led by the American Historical Association, those materials were transferred to microfilm, then deposited in the National Archives. Most of the originals were returned to what was then West Germany. Wolfe assisted in that effort, painstakingly cataloguing the materials in guides to be used by researchers.
In 1961, he joined the National Archives — formally the National Archives and Records Administration, and sometimes described as the nation’s official attic — where he remained until and beyond his official retirement in 1995. He became chief of the modern military records and was regarded as an authority on all the institution’s materials related to Nazi Germany, one of the most significant collections of its kind.
Among the items at the National Archives was an SS report documenting the shooting of 33,771 Jews at the Babi Yar ravine near Kiev in September 1941. There was a bill from the German pest-control corporation for a half-ton of Zyklon B, the poison used in gas chambers, shipped to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland.
Also in the archives was a copy of a speech given by SS chief Heinrich Himmler to SS generals in Poznan, Poland, in 1943.
“I also want to talk to you, quite frankly, on a very grave matter,” Himmler said, according to a translation published by The Associated Press. “I mean the clearing out of the Jew, the extermination of the Jewish race,” he continued. “This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.”
Himmler was “supposed to destroy” his notes, Wolfe told the AP. “Like a lot of bosses, he didn’t obey his own rules.”
Richard Breitman, a Holocaust scholar at American University in Washington, described Wolfe as “a critical factor in the evolution of research on Nazi Germany in the United States.”
He had a “near-encyclopedic knowledge” of the records, Breitman said, and helped historians, Nazi hunters and inquisitive members of the public sort through the vast quantities of microfilm to find the information they sought. Wolfe was credited with assisting Israeli prosecutors in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the long-fugitive Nazi war criminal who was captured, tried and executed in the early 1960s.
Wolfe also was a consultant to the State Department for the Berlin Document Center, a repository of Nazi Party membership, personnel and other records that was established in the Western sector of Berlin after World War II and administered for years by Americans until authority was transferred to Germany in 1994. Duplicates of the records there — 8 million feet of film on 38,000 rolls, according to a Washington Post account — were entered into the National Archives.
Robert Wolfe was born March 2, 1921, in Burlington, Vermont. His parents spoke to him in Yiddish, his son said, a skill that later helped him learn advanced German.
He received a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Vermont in 1942 and a master’s degree in political science from Columbia University in 1955. Wounded several times in the head during World War II, he received military decorations including the Purple Heart.
During postwar service in Germany, he met Ingeborg Kirch, now of Alexandria, to whom he was married for 66 years. Other survivors include their two sons, Randolph J. Wolfe of Tampa, Fla., and Marc Wolfe of Arlington, Va.; and three grandchildren.
In recent years, Wolfe was among the historians who assisted a large-scale federal effort to declassify U.S. records related to war criminals from World War II. He also served on a committee that studied thousands of pieces of German wartime artwork that were confiscated and held for decades in the United States. Most of those works, Wolfe argued, should be returned to Germany, and most of them were.
“I don’t think we should encourage other people to hold on to loot,” he told The Post in 2002. “They are more apt to cope with their past if they hold their own archives.”