You wouldn't happen to have any evidence of specific individuals in the West German government who took specific actions that restricted access to Bad Arolsen because of the desire to make compensation claims more difficult to process? How many compensation claims were impeded by closing Bad Arolsen?
Arolsen was closed
to historians and
to the public at the end of the 70s. That is the source of the trolling routine started by Ernst Zundel which is being recapitulated badly by Saggy.
Arolsen remained open for queries regarding compensation claims, but it handled them extremely slowly, with some queries taking up to five years to answer. The director of the Duesseldorf state archive called Arolsen a "Bermuda triangle" for queries.
http://www.ravensbrueckblaetter.de/alt/archiv/110/12_110.html
By 2004, there were supposedly half a million unanswered queries (most would have been from forced labourers, not Jewish survivors).
http://www.zeit.de/2005/21/ITS_neu
in fact, there's no supposedly about that figure. Download the 2002 annual report here
http://www.its-arolsen.org/de/service/publikationen/jahresberichte/index.html
go to page 22, and look at the numbers. 'Memorial' is a Russian foundation that gathered queries from former Ostarbeiter, 'Minsk' refers to a similar gathering of collective queries from Ostarbeiter and other deportees made after the end of the Cold War.
That is later on. The 70s closure to historians marked an end to cooperation between Arolsen and other institutions, who can be found quoted complaining about this through to the 2007 agreement to open up the archive for historical research.
Before the end of the 70s, you can find documents originally from Arolsen cited in a variety of works, eg if you look at the referencing in Danuta Czech's Auschwitz Chronicle, you will see "ISD Arolsen" cited. Czech's original work dates back to the beginning of the 60s. Some documents were copied, eg Yad Vashem got some files, ditto some KZ museums.
The closure
to historians and the public came about six years after the Ostpolitik-inspired agreements with East Bloc states for compensation. The ostensible reason was to prevent access to records with personal data which under German privacy law could not be revealed for 100 years. Other countries have similar privacy restrictions on census data and the like.
The desire of the German government to make compensation claims difficult has been a
standing feature of Wiedergutmachung since the 1950s. The bureaucracy involved has always been horrendous and decisions sometimes capricious. The point is that documentation is required to prove a case. Finding your name on a transport list or in muster rolls or inmate card indexes is a good way of proving that you were in fact in a concentration camp like you said you were.
In order to function as a tracing service, Arolsen copied a lot of materials from various archives and also took possession of original materials, some of which as mentioned were copied by museums etc in the 60s-70s. This stopped at the end of the 70s, meaning that survivors (of whatever origin) could not necessarily approach another museum/archive to find the documentary proof that they had been interned. No more copies/transfers meant that some of the documents were to be found only in Arolsen, and they also were no longer properly cooperating with other archives/museums/institutions.
The workpace can also be seen on p.22 of the 2002 report. In the 80s, a staff member at Arolsen processed less than 1 query/day. By 2002, this had risen to 3 queries/day/member of staff. Even allowing for the sheer size of the place, they *did* institute card indexes for a reason, and the work-pace is surely far below what one would expect from a civil service records centre.
The centre wasn't even run by the German government directly, it was and is under the ICRC, and always headed by a Swiss director. But the German government funded it, and the staff were almost all German.
So no, I cannot give any hard evidence that the West German government deliberately closed Arolsen, but I can offer a great deal more circumstantial evidence that the German state has had influence over Arolsen than the sodding "Zionists" of Saggy's fantasies.
And it certainly wasn't out of fear of revisionism that Arolsen shut its doors to historians and the public. Privacy restrictions are what they are in Germany as elsewhere. Other agencies managed to cope with them much better than Arolsen did, which simply didn't even bother to try to manage them with non-disclosure agreements of the kind that people have to sign if they visit a legal archive, enjoining them to use pseudonyms or to abbreviate surnames.
Zundel and other deniers trolled over Arolsen because it was "closed" and therefore mysterious, unfortunately it's now open.... and Saggy hasn't changed the record from the good old days of the 1980s when Fat Ernst bestrode the world like the colossal idiot that he was.