Major William D. Browne
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Major William D. Browne is a former U.S. Army officer. He served in the postwar occupation military government of Germany, as a Major in the Third Army.
Browne was the author of a 1946 U.S. Army Report: "Covering the locating, safeguarding, collecting and disposition of NSDAP records during period 19 September 1945 to 21 January 1946, by the Office of Military Government for Regierungsbezirk Oberbayern."
The report, which is lodged in the U.S. National Archives, describes the discovery of the Nazi Party's worldwide membership card files in May 1945 by U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps Agents. Browne came upon the files in September 1945, after they had been abandoned by personnel of the U.S. Army's Seventh Army, who had moved some of the files to their headquarters in Munich. When Browne re-discovered the abandoned files, he brought them to the attention of General Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), which immediately ordered a major task force to organize and catalog the files. Browne's discovery received worldwide press coverage.
The files subsequently became the heart of the collections of the Berlin Document Center (BDC), and were instrumental in the Allied Denazification of Germany, and in the Nuremberg War Crimes trials.
[edit] 2000 controversy
In 2000, a biography of former U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps Agent Michel Thomas stated that he had been the original rescuer of the files in May 1945. Relying solely on the press reports from the fall of 1945, a Los Angeles Times humor columnist who profiled Thomas suggested that the account in Thomas's biography was not credible. Thomas sued the columnist for defamation, and commissioned a private investigator to research the historical record. The investigator found Browne's report in the National Archives, and it became the basis for a 2001 monograph by Robert Wolfe, an Archives expert on captured German war documents. It concluded that Thomas was the CIC Agent who had originally rescued the files in May 1945.
