WCC tracing service
The tracing service of the Austrian Red Cross supports people who have been separated from one another due to wars , armed conflicts , disasters or migration in re-establishing contact with their family members. Instruments for this are the transmission of Red Cross messages, the search for people and family reunification. But often it is only possible to clarify the fate of the missing person .
The WCC's tracing service works closely with the global Red Cross network - the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
history
The year of birth of the tracing service - before the founding of the Austrian Red Cross in 1880 - is 1866, when the then Austro-Hungarian monarchy acceded to the Geneva Conventions .
Both during and after the First World War , but especially after the end of the Second World War , the tracing service played a central role. On the one hand, inquiries about missing and abducted civilians were processed; on the other hand, it was a matter of recording the names of missing soldiers . Essential aids for this work were the return home surveys and the missing persons picture lists. There was a renewed increase in the number of missing person searches for the Second World War in the 1990s due to the opening of numerous archives and registries in the former Soviet Union , which contain information about the fate of German and Austrian prisoners of war . Despite the intensive and dedicated work over the past decades, the fate of around 20,000 soldiers and the whereabouts of several thousand civilians are still unclear. Since the mid-1990s, the WCC's tracing service has also been helping former forced laborers obtain the confirmations they need to assert their claims for compensation and for crediting them against retirement periods .
Over time, however, inquiries relating to current conflicts became more and more important in Tracing Service work. In the 1990s, the work was mainly dominated by the Balkan conflicts . The main task here was the transmission of Red Cross messages. More than 90,000 messages could be exchanged between relatives who had been separated from each other.
Today the range of services offered by the tracing service is broad: the main focus is on supporting refugees from current conflict areas. It is about re-establishing contact with their relatives and reuniting with them. Search cases and clarifications of fate that go back to the Second World War continue to occupy a large part of the work of the WCC's tracing service.
Development goals of the tracing service work
Since being separated from relatives and knowing nothing of their whereabouts is an enormous psychological burden and torture for those affected, the WCC's tracing service offers those affected appropriate support in re-establishing contact between separated families. For this purpose there is close cooperation with appropriate refugee and migration advice centers as well as with the affected communities themselves. The aim is that all affected persons know about the support services that the tracing service can offer. In addition, volunteer teams work in the tracing service in individual federal states, offering these advisory and support services on a decentralized basis.
Another objective of the tracing service is to raise public awareness of the problem of missing persons and to show how stressful it is for people not to know anything about the fate of their loved ones. Various events are held for this purpose ( International Day of the Disappeared , World Refugee Day , Family Day , etc.) and appropriate public relations and media work is carried out.
tasks
- Transmission of Red Cross messages
- People search
- Clarifications of fate and determination of grave sites
- Procurement of confirmations and documents (in particular forced labor, residence, detention)
- Family reunions
Red Cross News
Red Cross messages are used for personal and private communication between family members when the conventional means of communication (such as post or telephone) are severely restricted or have completely failed. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the respective National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies act as transmitters of Red Cross messages. It is essential that only family, private and personal messages as well as official documents (e.g. birth certificates , certificates) and a maximum of 1–2 family photos are allowed. Under no circumstances can sums of money be passed on. Every Red Cross message is checked by the ICRC with regard to compliance with the stated rules (censorship).
Form:
- Format A5
- Front: Sender and recipient with address details
- Back: Text that may be limited depending on the case.
Depending on the language and culture, separate Red Cross message forms are used, e.g. B. Russian for Chechnya ; English / French for Africa ; Farsi for Iran ; Arabic for Iraq ; Etc.
process
The sender in Austria (providing personal data and address in Austria necessary to transmit the expected response) writes his message to the recipient on the appropriate form, whereby the name, date of birth (for clear identification) and delivery address must be known and transmitted or Submit this message to the WCC tracing service. The Red Cross message is sent to the recipient via the Red Cross network. The recipient of the original message then has the option of replying to the sender via a Red Cross message. This message is also transmitted to the current recipient via the Red Cross network.
People search
The tracing service is looking for family members who have been separated from one another by war, conflict, disaster or migration. The cooperation takes place with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the ICRC delegations and the national societies. For inquiries, the tracing service requires the most comprehensive information possible from the person sought in order to be able to carry out the relevant investigations, in particular:
- the full name (first name, family name, possibly maiden name)
- the exact date of birth
- the place of birth
- the last known address
- as well as the date and place of the last message and the circumstances that led to the loss of contact.
process
The applicant must submit the search request to the National Society where his / her permanent residence is located. The search in the corresponding target country is carried out via the Red Cross network - ICRC and the corresponding National Red Cross or Red Crescent Society. In many cases it is considered expedient to first try to contact the last known address via a Red Cross message, as it has been shown time and again that contact can be re-established more quickly in this way. If the person you are looking for is found, he or she receives the information that the applicant has submitted a search request. The current address of the found person can only be passed on with their explicit consent.
Declarations of fate
After the end of the Second World War, soldiers returning from the prisoner-of-war camps were asked about the fate of their comrades. From December 1957, the German Red Cross began printing a list of missing persons . Almost 200 individual volumes (structured according to units) contain around 900,000 photographs . The opening of the archives in the former Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s and subsequently also other archives in Eastern European countries raised new hopes for those who still do not know anything about the fate of their missing relatives. However, by far not all fates have been clarified to this day, and this will probably never be the case with some. Relatives of soldiers of the German Wehrmacht or the Red Army who died in captivity or who died as a prisoner of war often ask to find out their final resting place.
Confirmations
Victims of the Nazi regime ask for confirmations of the forced labor performed in Austria or of the internment in the Mauthausen concentration camp , among other things for crediting them against their retirement periods. Children of former forced laborers who stayed with their parents in Austria during the war, ask the tracing service for assistance in obtaining confirmation of residence.
Confirmations of detention are generally issued in connection with current conflicts, namely in those cases where the person concerned was visited by delegates of the ICRC while in custody and corresponding records are therefore available. These are often requested by those affected, mostly asylum seekers , in order to improve their chances in the asylum procedure, as they can be used to prove detention and, indirectly, persecution in their country of origin.
Family reunion
The tracing service supports families who have been separated due to war, the consequences of war, political pressure or natural disasters , in being able to live in family again. He advises those seeking help in the family procedure under the Asylum Act 2005.
The tracing service can offer the following services:
- Support with applications for family reunification
- Contact with Austrian authorities at home and abroad
- Immigration processing
- Travel organization and handling
- Financial perspective clarification