Russia to Open Files on German POWs

Russia has agreed to hand over the files on two million German prisoners of war and civilian detainees in World War II to the German Red Cross, the non-governmental organization said on Tuesday. Rudolf Seiters, the head of the German Red Cross, said that with the files "we hope to throw light on the fate of those who are still missing." The Red Cross has already established the fate of 200,000

Germans thanks to documents supplied by Russia, but what happened to around 1.3 million other Germans still remains a mystery. Sixty years since the end of the war, 2,000 requests for information are still lodged every year by the families of the missing.