Nazi documents hidden in dance records

Now Pat Goodship's discovery, dating from 1946, is to be auctioned in Swindon.

Mrs Goodship, 52, spent £2 on two small boxes of 78rpm records at a North Wiltshire auction house.

At the bottom of piles of chipped Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and dance band discs, she found a series of books and papers, many in German.

She hoped they were sheet music, which she collects, but soon realised they related to World War Two.

Mrs Goodship, a married mother of two, said: "I saw four or five sheets listing 33 accused and where they were held.

"There was a list of all the victims and one of witnesses.

"Over two or three days, I kept picking the papers up, looking at them and trying to piece them together."

Mrs Goodship, from Compton Bassett, also enlisted the help of her son, Paul, who has a good knowledge of German.

Finally, she decided to call in the Old Town auction house of Dominic Winter, whose document specialist, Richard Westwood-Brookes, is studying her discovery.

He said today: "This is a classic find.

"A woman buys boxes of 78s for £2, hopes to find sheet music and finds instead a file on Nazi war crimes from 1946."

Mr Westwood-Brookes added that much of the data seemed to concern a man called Josef Schmeiden, who may have worked at Dachau.

This was the notorious prison camp which specialised in holding political detainees, many of whom perished.

However, further investigation will take place before the documents are auctioned, probably next month.

At the end of World War Two, thousands of Nazis and many Japanese were brought to trial over atrocities committed during the conflict.

Many were executed, many more jailed and many of those who fell into Soviet hands were never seen again.

In subsequent years, war criminals who had escaped justice were tracked down.

Perhaps the most famous was Karl Adolf Eichmann, who was captured by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960 and hanged for his crimes in 1962.