Drexel Sprecher was educated at the University of Wisconsin, the London School of Economics, and at the Harvard School of Law before receiving a position at the US Government's Labor Board in 1938. He enlisted in the American military after the United States declared war on Germany, and was posted to London. After the war, Sprecher served as a prosecutor of Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials.
The Germans were tremendous document keepers and very few documents were destroyed. Orders were made to destroy the documents in the concentration camps themselves, but in some cases this wasn't even done, or in some cases the Russians advanced so quickly that they still found lists of people who had been exterminated or some of the documents about the concentration camp after they'd occupied it.
We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies, Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation, the Claims Conference, EVZ, and BMF for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. View the list of donor acknowledgement.