Japan on Thursday selected the records of a diplomat who helped thousands of Jews escape the Holocaust and three ancient stone monuments as candidates for UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.

Chiune Sugihara was the acting consul in Lithuania in 1940, where he issued transit visas to around 6,000 Jews who then were able to escape Nazi persecution. Driven by humanitarian instincts, he acted in defiance of a Japanese government order prohibiting the issuance.

Japan will file the applications next March with the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. A UNESCO advisory board will decide whether to add them to the register in summer 2017.