WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Senate is urging quick action by six countries to allow the opening of a secret Nazi archive holding millions of pages that document the lives and deaths of millions of World War II concentration camp inmates.

In a resolution passed Wednesday, the Senate urged a the international commission that controls access to the archives to speed up at its meeting next month in Amsterdam, Netherlands, a process to make them public.

Until recently the archives held in Bad Arolsen, Germany, had been kept in secrecy during the six decades since the war. The documents' importance became clearer in recent months after The Associated Press obtained extensive access to the material on condition that victims not be identified fully.