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Norman Goda Norman Goda has at his fingertips enough records on German and Japanese war crimes during World War II to fill a large warehouse. An Athens campus associate professor of history, Goda took leave this year to serve on a presidential commission reviewing millions of U.S. records prior to the documents' declassification and public release. His work with three other historians and a team of research assistants at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., will help determine what new information the public learns about Nazi and Japanese war crimes and criminals. "This is the biggest declassification project, in terms of volume, that the government has ever undertaken," says Goda, an expert on modern Germany and author of the 1998 book "Tomorrow the World: Hitler, Northwest Africa and the Path Toward America." Among the war records being declassified are those of the FBI, the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps and the CIA and its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services. The researchers already have released some documents, including an intercepted dispatch written by a Chilean diplomat indicating the American and British intelligence communities knew by March 1942 of Germany's ultimate intent to murder all European Jews. Also made public were the CIA files on Adolf Hitler, Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Mueller and other officials of the Third Reich.     This photo from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, which is part of the National Archives, depicts (from left) Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess. "There's a tremendous amount of detail that's coming out that fills in the gaps," Goda says. "It'll keep historians busy for years." It also will provide fodder for the master's theses and dissertations of the graduate students Goda advises, enhance courses he teaches on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust and provide background for a book he is writing on war criminals. More on the work of the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Interagency Working Group can be found on the Web at http://www.nara.gov/iwg (a new browser window will open when you follow this link) Mary Alice Casey