AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — Holocaust survivors move closer this week to being able to find a paper trail of their own persecution when the keepers of a Nazi archive deliver copies of Gestapo papers and concentration camp records to museums in Washington and Jerusalem.

For a survivor, it could be discovering one’s name on a list of deportees crammed into a cattle car; a record of a fiendish medical experiment from which physical or mental scars remain; an innocuous-looking “behavior report” condemning the inmate to further tortures, or an order from the Gestapo, the secret police, to liquidate a camp, signaling the start of a “death march” in the closing days of World War II.

But it will be months before the archive can be used by survivors or victims’ relatives to search family histories. Even after it opens to the public, navigating the vast files for specific names will be nearly impossible without a trained guide. This week, the director of the International Tracing Service, custodian of the unique collection that has been locked away for a half century in Germany, is transferring six computer hard drives bearing electronic images of 20 million pages to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Copies will go to the Yad Vashem Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem.

It is the first tranche of digital copies from one of the world’s largest Nazi archives, with the final documents scheduled to be copied and delivered by early 2009.

“For research into the Holocaust, this is the main substance. It is the heart of the archive,” said Reto Meister, the former Swiss diplomat who heads ITS, a branch of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Mr. Meister will hand over the hard drives to museum director Sara Bloomfield in Washington. He also will brief American congressional staff on progress in opening the files — a nod to American lawmakers who pressed the ITS’s 11-nation oversight commission to open the doors.

Though the museums’ researchers can begin working with the material immediately, the public must wait for legal formalities to conclude — which could take several more months.

Unlocking the archive required 11 countries to amend their international treaty. France, Italy, and Greece have yet to complete the process. The others on the commission are America, Israel, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Luxembourg, and Germany. The index of 17.5 million names on file with ITS is the key to finding documents and will arrive later this year, though it is not in computer-readable format and cannot be used like Google. “The public will be able to come to the museum and see the material in the manner in which we received it,” said Paul Shapiro, director of the museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.

Also, there is no guarantee that a name appears in the archive. It may have been among the many destroyed by the Nazis as their defeat approached.