San Diego, CA (special) -- The trucks were waiting outside a warehouse in Moscow when U.S. President Bill Clinton put in a telephone call to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. It is all right, don't worry about it, Yeltsin assured Clinton

Not long afterwards, Yeltsin telephoned a general in charge of the internal security agency formerly known as the KGB. Da! Da! said the general. 

He turned to his visitors from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. All right, he said, you may take them.

Thus, said William Parsons, the Holocaust Museum's chief of staff, did the Russian government turn over to U.S. historians for cataloguing and research purposes warehouses full of documents captured from nazi Germany at the end of World War II.

How important could these documents be?

"It was literally the last week that the kids (student interns) were there; one of the German kids pulls out a box that says 'SS pensions' and looks inside and it is Himmler's appointment book."

Heinrich Himmler was the head of the SS and was widely considered the second in power in nazi Germany only to Adolf Hitler.

German researchers working cooperatively with the Holocaust Museum are combing through the book now with particular attention to who knew what about the SS campaigns against Jews and other European minorities--and when they knew it.

Parsons was at San Diego's Hall of Champions for the June 30 opening of his museum's traveling exhibition on the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In an interview, he said Himmler's diary is only a small piece of the puzzle that is becoming available to western Holocaust scholars now that the Cold War between the former Soviet Union and the United States is over.

The material in the Moscow warehouses have been kept in shoe boxes "for I don't know how long," Parsons said. "There is no cataloguing system. It is kind of like -- if you ever saw the movie Indiana Jones, the last segment with the Ark in a government warehouse, lost forever. You walk into these and you just go and go and go, and they don't know what is in them."

The situation is similar in Warsaw, where "we went to the Jewish Institute there and the roof is leaking and they have shoe boxes of stuff, material that is rotting away."

And at the former Majdanek Concentration Camp, records and artifacts are in similar danger of being destroyed by neglect. "Uniforms were just lying on the floor rotting away. So we go in there and create conservation labs; we train people how to do things to preserve them. Now we have these rotating exchanges between us and Majdanek and some of the others."

Sometimes people are bigger dangers to the Holocaust materials than the elements are, Parsons said.

"We had a deal with the Romanian government for 200,000 files," he said. "The deal was all set, ready to go. We get a call; they want to hold it up. Why? 'Well, we have to look at these records.' What happened was they started looking at them and they wanted to clean them up because people in power today in corporations and government officials were in those records as perpetrators.

"So suddenly some one got smart there and thought 'we have to clean these up.' We said 'no...a deal is a deal. This is for history; you don't have to clean them up.' We fought like cats and dogs, back and forth, back and forth, and we got them uncleaned."

Parsons said such leverage "only comes because of the stature of the (Holocaust) Museum as an arm of the United States government. So we can call on the State Department; call on the power of Washington. You can't get that anywhere else (in the museum world). 

"It was President Clinton who got the KGB files out (of Moscow); we couldn't get it out on our own. It took Clinton to call Yeltsin and basically make the deal to let it go. It wasn't until Yeltsin then called down to the general of the former KGB that they were released."

Parsons was asked how closely the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum works with Yad Vashem, the Holocaust research center and memorial in Israel. In reply, Parsons interlaced his fingers. Better than hand-in-glove, "all the fingers are interlaced," he said. 

The two museums have divided research efforts in Europe. "You do Moldavia, we'll do Bavaria, and so forth," he said. "Everything we get, we give to them, and everything they get, they give to us. It is all on microfiche, so it can be shared."

Soon that cooperation will benefit outside researchers who do their work by internet. "We are working toward a linkage, so that when you look up the Warsaw Ghetto, wherever you are, you can get all their material on the Warsaw Ghetto and all our material on the Warsaw Ghetto."

Similarly, he said, "The Shoah Foundation (the Steven Spielberg-funded foundation which has been videotaping interviews with Holocaust Survivors) is linking up to the Wiesenthal Center (in Los Angeles) and then we are going to link from the Wiesenthal Center to the museum in Washington," he said. "There is collaboration on different levels."

The Holocaust Museum official said much more data is needed to fill in the gaps in knowledge about the Holocaust.

"I would like to see people's stories who can help fill those gaps, especially on the Eastern front (between Germany and Russia) and a lot of the stuff in France. The French have not been forthcoming with their archives." 

Other areas where much information remains to be collected and analyzed are those dealing with the fate of other victims of the nazis, in particular Gypsies, homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses, Parsons said.

Parsons describes himself as a WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant), whose great-great-great grandfather was Miles Standish, the aristocratic Plymouth Colony figure who was the disappointed suitor in the famous Longfellow poem The Courtship of Miles Standish.

He became a teacher in 1968 in an inner city school in Massachusetts, and found that there was no material dealing with the Holocaust when it came time to teach World War II history. 

"So I began to put together a unit" which developed into a program and foundation called "Facing History and Ourselves." That led to Parsons being invited by school districts around the country to help write their curricula. In 1985, he went to the Public Broadcasting System where he worked on the "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize" series about the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Two years before the Holocaust Museum opened, he was invited to become director of its educational program. Four years ago he became chief of staff, the third ranking position behind the director and assistant director.

Educational outreach is a major aspect of the Holocaust Museum, he said. 

The museum has a program for educators who have become quite familiar with the Holocaust, to give them further training.

"They come in for a series of in-depth workshops for us; they go back, and they get to apply for money to help sponsor projects," Parsons said. "So one might decide to set up a small resource center to supply teachers in a school system with materials they couldn't otherwise get. The museum will help pay for that. Or they might conduct a workshop or speak for us at different conferences."

Another program is for teachers with little or superficial familiarity with the Holocaust. They also are invited to Washington to "get a basis for what this history is about, why it is important, why it should be introduced in a school system; how to make it part of a course on World War II" and so forth.

Both programs have far more applicants each year than spots available, Parsons said.