Arolsen Archives

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Arolsen Archives
 

The main building of the former ITS in Bad Arolsen
www.its-arolsen.org

The Arolsen Archives - International Center on Nazi Persecution are a center for documentation, information and research on National Socialist persecution, Nazi forced labor and the Holocaust based in the North Hessian city of Bad Arolsen . Until 20 May 2019, the organization was known as International Tracing Service ( english International Tracing Service ; ITS ) known. The main tasks of the ITS were clarifying the fate of those persecuted by the Nazi regime and searching for family members, providing information to survivors and family members of Nazi victims, research, education and remembrance, as well as the storage, preservation and indexing of documents.

In June 2013, the archive of the International Tracing Service was included in the UNESCO World Document Heritage .

Work of the International Tracing Service

organization

The ITS is financed from the budget of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM). It is supervised by the International Committee, which is made up of representatives from the eleven participating countries ( Germany , Belgium , France , Great Britain , Greece , Israel , Italy , Luxembourg , Netherlands , Poland , USA ) and meets twice a year. The chairmanship of the International Committee rotates annually between the member states. Floriane Azoulay has been director of the ITS since January 2016. The director has been appointed directly by the International Committee since 2012. As of September 1, 2018, ITS had almost 240 employees.

tasks

The main task of the ITS when it was founded was the search for non-German persons in the area of ​​the then German Reich and the German-occupied areas between 1933 and 1945 who had been abducted during the Second World War or were missing for other reasons . The ITS provides information about the following groups of victims of the National Socialist tyranny:

  • People of all nationalities who were deported between 1933 and 1945 and imprisoned in concentration camps , ghettos, labor camps and Gestapo prisons
  • People who were deported to what was then Reich territory and who had to do forced labor
  • DPs ( Displaced Persons DP), the international after liberation under the care of refugee organizations were
  • Children who were under 18 after the liberation and who belonged to the groups of persecuted
  • Soviet prisoners of war and Italian military internees as well as other prisoners of war who were deported to concentration camps or who had to do forced labor

Information about the fate of the people comes from documents of the Gestapo, work books, medical reports, registration lists in the camps, transit lists to other camps, death lists, emigration lists, lists of aid organizations.

Inquiries - information

Information on the fate of former Nazi persecutees is given to survivors, their relatives or, with the consent of those affected, to third parties.

If the investigation reveals the death of a person, this can be certified by the Arolsen Special Registry Office upon request . The documents in the ITS archive were and are still important in the context of compensation and for proving pension entitlements. Victims of Nazi persecution had to prove their entitlement by means of certificates of forced labor, persecution, terms of imprisonment, injuries and illness. Issuing these certificates was, for example, a major task of the ITS in the late 1950s and 1960s. The ITS website was redesigned in 2016 to increase the use of the Internet for providing information and inspecting files.

In 2015, the ITS received more than 15,000 inquiries. They came from 74 countries. Interest is particularly high in Germany, the Russian Federation, Poland, the United States, France and Israel. Thanks to its documentation, the ITS can provide information and make copies of documents available in around 50 percent of cases. There are increasing numbers of inquiries from the second and third generation looking for information about the fate of their family members.

The ITS tracing service, which is still active today, brings families together in around 30 cases each year where relatives never got to know each other during the Nazi era as a result of deportation, forced labor or emigration (e.g. half-siblings). The ITS works closely with the network of national tracing services of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent. One of the outstanding individual fates in 2015 was, for example, the reunification of mother and daughter who had been separated in 1944. During the phase of compensation for Eastern European forced laborers through the “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” foundation between 2000 and 2007, the ITS received around 950,000 inquiries. As a result, a large backlog of inquiries built up, which has meanwhile caused considerable damage to the reputation of the facility. In particular, inquiries that were not directly related to the fund remained unanswered.

The archive is also accessible to researchers.

archive

Stocks

With around 30 million documents, the ITS is one of the world's largest collections of documents on civilian victims of National Socialist rule. The staff of the International Tracing Service have worked with archives at home and abroad for many decades to supplement the stock of documents in order to sift through their holdings with a view to their own information needs and, if necessary, to copy or purchase documents.

The Central Name Index contains information on around 17.5 million people. The total inventory of the archive is around 26 running kilometers of paper (that is, paper lined up on edge, sheet to sheet) and comprises around 30 million documents. They provide information about the extent of the persecution by the Nazi regime of violence, the unscrupulous exploitation through forced labor and the consequences of the Second World War for millions of refugees. Essentially, the holdings are divided into the three large areas of imprisonment, forced labor and displaced persons. Among the documents are preserved files from several concentration camps, prisons, ghettos as well as work books, medical files, insurance documents, registration cards from authorities, health insurance companies and employers etc. and also files from Lebensborn , Organization Todt , Gestapo and SS.

The ITS's central name index comprises 50 million reference cards for 17.5 million people. In 2013 it was included in the UNESCO “Memory of the World” register.

But also individual documents of outstanding historical importance, such as the lists of Jewish forced laborers whom the industrialist Oskar Schindler saved from death. Also documents by Anne Frank , Simon Wiesenthal , Konrad Adenauer and others. a. can be found in the stocks.

Effects from stocks

Effects are personal items that were removed from prisoners when they were brought to the concentration camp. The ITS keeps effects from around 3,200 former prisoners in its archive, of which around 2,700 are known by name. As a rule, the objects have no material value, but they have a high ideal value for the family members. Not infrequently they are a last memento. The effects include wallets, identification papers, photos, letters, certificates and occasionally fashion jewelry, cigarette cases, wedding rings, watches and fountain pens belonging to the former concentration camp inmates. They come mainly from the Neuengamme (2,400) and Dachau (330) concentration camps. In addition, there are items from a few prisoners from the Hamburg Gestapo, from the Natzweiler and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps and the Amersfoort and Compiègne transit camps.

The ITS aims to return the effects to the owners or families of those persecuted by the Nazis. Every year it succeeds in a few cases. The number has increased since the effects were published in 2015 with photos in the ITS online archive and anyone interested can now search for them. The ITS provides detailed information on the holdings of the securities on its website.

Digitization of the archive material

In order to preserve the historically valuable documents for future generations, the digitization, electronic indexing and storage of the archive material is another important part of the work of the ITS. This began after the digitization of the Central Name Index, which was completed in 1999. Almost all original documents are electronically scanned and researchable. The digitization of the approximately three million ITS correspondence cases with victims, their relatives and authorities is in progress. According to a decision of the International Committee, however, only Member States can receive a full digital copy of the documents held by the ITS. In addition, the state of preservation of the archived documents is preserved as far as possible through restoration and conservation in order to protect the documents in question from loss of information. These measures mainly include deacidification to prevent paper disintegration, delamination, the repair of mechanical damage and appropriately protected storage.

Finding aids

In order to make the documents in the ITS archive accessible for research, the ITS started indexing the documents in December 2008. Up until now, the central name index was the key to the documents. However, historians also ask about places, events, nationalities and contexts. Basically, the aim is to develop online-capable finding aids according to generally recognized professional archive standards. The ITS has now published several finding aids on the Internet. The indexing should pave the way to the holdings and archives of the ITS. Given the size of the documents, this process will take several years.

The ITS online archive

One of the tasks of the ITS is to make the archive documents accessible to a broader public. In 2015, the institution began to gradually publish selected holdings in an online archive. The criteria for publication via the portal are above all the degree of scientific processing and archival indexing. The documents should be interesting for research as well as for those affected, relatives and descendants as well as family researchers, but also, for example, in the context of school projects. In 2015, the first three holdings were the photos of the effects stored in the archive, partial holdings of files from the child tracing service and documents about the death marches, for which a georeferenced representation on a map is available as a view. All locations for which documents are available are shown on the map.

Differentiation from other archives

For the fate of prisoners of war exists in Geneva the Central Tracing agency ( Central Tracing Agency ) of the International Committee of the Red Cross succeed the previously existing International Center for prisoners of war . Search queries are processed.

Archives and research on displaced persons and German soldiers are carried out by other tracing services. Investigations into missing German nationals, provided they are not considered victims of National Socialism, are the responsibility of the Tracing Service of the German Red Cross (DRK) and institutions such as the German Office (WASt) . The Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge exists for war dead of the German armed forces .

Origin and history

carrier

Photo from the ITS, around 1970

When the Allies saw the end of the Second World War approaching in 1943 , more detailed surveys were carried out on the situation of prisoners, forced laborers and refugees in Central Europe. This task was the headquarters of the Allied Forces ( Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force , SHAEF) and took over on February 15, 1944, the work of a Central Tracing offices, its location as a result of the war went from London to Versailles and then to Frankfurt was laid. After the end of the war, the management was transferred to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and in June 1947 to the International Refugee Organization (IRO) as its successor organization. As early as January 1946, the headquarters were relocated to the small Hessian town of Arolsen, today Bad Arolsen , as it was located in the geographical center of the four occupation zones in Germany and had an infrastructure that was barely damaged by the war. From January 1948 on, the tracing service operated under the name "International Tracing Service" (ITS), which is still valid today.

In April 1951, the first took over Allied High Commission for Germany ( Allied High Commission for Germany , HICOG) the management of the ITS. Due to an official request from the then Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to Paul Ruegger , at the time President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) , the ICRC was responsible for the management from 1955. The ITS is under the supervision of an international committee made up of representatives from eleven countries. A corresponding contract between the governments of the countries involved and an agreement with the ICRC were concluded on June 6, 1955 for the legal regulation of these responsibilities and the mandate of the tracing service. For the validity of these agreements, known as the “Bonn Treaties”, an indefinite period was finally agreed on May 5, 1965, after an initially existing five-year time limit and a further extension for another five years. In September 1990 the Federal Republic of Germany undertook to continue to guarantee the work of the ITS. The Berlin Agreement has formed the legal basis since January 2013. They have replaced the Bonn treaties. The ICRC withdrew from the management of the ITS at the end of 2012 because the new tasks in the area of ​​archives and research are not among the typical areas of operation of the humanitarian institution. The federal archive is now an institutional partner .

Opening up to historical research

In the visitors' office of the archives on Grosse Strasse

In the course of its history, the focus of activities of the ITS has shifted from the search for missing persons to documentation in the form of collecting and evaluating documents and providing information. Since the archive created in the course of this work is also of great interest for historical research, a protocol to amend the Bonn Treaties was adopted on May 16, 2006, which enables corresponding access to the documents of the tracing service. This protocol had to be ratified by the eleven member states of the International Committee. Based on the minutes, specific access regulations were established at the annual meeting of the International Committee in May 2007. With the opening of the archive for historical research, copies of the digitized holdings will be made available to Member States on request. Each country determines the recipient institution itself. Seven states have now made use of it. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington received such a copy for the United States, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial for Israel , the National Institute of Remembrance in Warsaw for Poland , and the Center de Documentation et de Recherche sur la Résistance for Luxembourg , for Belgium the General State Archives in Brussels , for France the National Archives in Pierrefitte-sur Seine and for Great Britain the Wiener Library .

In November 2007 the files were released for historical research. Corresponding demands for the archive to be opened up and for access to be improved by making copies of the databases have been made for many years, in particular by victim initiatives, by associations of Holocaust survivors, by politicians from the USA and Israel, and by historians such as Paul A. Shapiro , the head of the department Historian of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The delays caused by the negotiation of the amending protocol and the ratification process have been repeatedly criticized by these people and institutions. In addition to the restrictions arising from the existing contracts, the ITS also referred to the legal situation in Germany for the protection of personal data. Due to the international responsibilities for the ITS, the various interest groups disputed the extent to which the archives of the ITS are actually subject to German data protection law.

Legal bases

The legal basis for the work of the ITS is the Convention on the International Tracing Service of December 9, 2011, signed in Berlin. The Convention replaced the Bonn Treaties of 1955 and the Amending Protocol of 2006, which were in effect until December 31, 2012. Until the end of 2012, the Bonn Treaties formed the legal basis of the International Tracing Service, which was concluded in June 1955. These included the agreement on the establishment of an international committee by the governments of Belgium , France , the Federal Republic of Germany , Greece , Israel , Italy , Luxembourg , the Netherlands , the United Kingdom and the United States , as well as the agreement on relations between the international committee for the International Tracing Service and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Poland also joined the International Committee in March 2000, which now consists of eleven countries. Other relevant agreements and arrangements were the extension and amending protocols of August 23, 1960 and May 5, 1965, the Convention of July 15, 1993 on the legal status of the International Tracing Service in Arolsen, the Rules of Procedure of the Tracing Service in the version of May 2000 and the protocol amending the Bonn treaties of May 16, 2006, which made it possible to open the archive.

Until the end of 2012, France had a liaison mission (FVM) at the ITS, which was under the archive department of the Foreign Office in Paris. The main task of the FVM was to help French nationals with inquiries to the ITS. These were collected and registered by the FVM and, in addition to the ITS, passed on to other relevant bodies such as the ICRC in Geneva. The ITS also worked with the French liaison mission on inquiries from foreign nationals, insofar as these relate to the person concerned staying on French territory during the Second World War.

Awards from the ITS institution

  • On October 16, 2013, the ITS was included in the UNESCO Register of World Document Heritage (Memory of the World).

swell

  • List of World Document Heritage UNESCO
  • ITS website; online at ITS Bad Arolsen
  • Website of the Federal Archives Bundesarchiv.de
  • International Committee of the Red Cross website; online at ICRC.org
  • ITS annual reports; online as PDF files under ITS annual reports
  • Legal basis of the International Tracing Service; online as PDF files under the Berlin Convention
  • Frequently Asked Questions about the International Tracing Service Archives on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website; online at [1]

literature

  • Martin Weinmann (Ed.): The National Socialist Camp System. CCP. Further contributions from Anne Kaiser and Ursula Krause-Schmitt. Zweiausendeins , Frankfurt 1990. (3rd edition. 1998, ISBN 3-86150-261-5 ).
  • Caroline Moorehead : Dunant's Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross. HarperCollins, London 1999, ISBN 0-00-638883-3 , pp. 518-522.
  • Charles-Claude Biedermann: Over 10.5 million. 60 years of history and use of the personal documentation kept by the International Tracing Service about the former civilian persecuted by the Nazi regime. ITS, Bad Arolsen 2003.
  • Frank-Uwe Betz: The other memorial. In: The time . Issue 21 from May 19, 2005 (online)
  • Jan Erik Schulte: National Socialism and European Migration History. The archive of the International Tracing Service in Arolsen . In: Zeithistorische Forschungen / Studies in Contemporary History 4 (2007), pp. 223–232.
  • Anne Kunze: Registries of Hell. In: The time. Issue 25 from June 14, 2012 (online)
  • Annual reports of the ITS
  • The yearbooks of the ITS with articles by numerous authors on the research potential and the work of the ITS have been published by Wallstein Verlag under the title “Exposures”. [2]
  • With the "Fundstücke" series, the ITS refers to little-known but historically significant documents in the archive. [3]
  • Susanne Urban: "My only document is the number on the hand ...". Statements by survivors of Nazi persecution in the International Tracing Service. Metropol , Berlin 2018. ISBN 978-3-86331-429-3 .

Web links

Commons : Arolsen Archives  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ITS press release www.its-arolsen.org, (accessed on November 23, 2016)
  2. Archives of the International Tracing Service www.unesco.org, (accessed June 19, 2013)
  3. (fr) Laurent Guillet: Il s'appelait Joseph. Editions Laurent Guillet, Limerzel 2011. ISBN 978-2-918588-03-0 . P. 325. (Camp stations of a French prisoner of war until his death, approach to research).
  4. (fr) Laurent Guillet: Il s'appelait Joseph. Editions Laurent Guillet, Limerzel 2011. ISBN 978-2-918588-03-0 . Pp. 323-341. (Camp stations of a French prisoner of war until his death, approach to research).
  5. ^ Collection of the ITS
  6. Form for inquiries from survivors and family members
  7. - Family reunification mother and daughter
  8. Research application form
  9. The ITS archive - inventory overview by subject
  10. Charles-Claude Biedermann: Over 10.5 million - 60 years of history and use of the personal documentation kept by the International Tracing Service about the former civilian persecuted by the Nazi regime. ITS, Bad Arolsen 2003, p. 72.
  11. The Central Name Index its-arolsen.org, (accessed on November 23, 2016)
  12. Inventory overview its-arolsen.org, (accessed on November 23, 2016)
  13. Charles-Claude Biedermann: Over 10.5 million - 60 years of history and use of the personal documentation kept by the International Tracing Service about the former civilian persecuted by the Nazi regime. ITS, Bad Arolsen 2003, "Document inventory of the International Tracing Service" pp. 27–37 & "Sachdokumente", pp. 61–64.
  14. ^ ITS annual report 2008; P. 16 pdf online (accessed on November 23, 2016)
  15. Victims of National Socialism 17.5 million fates, ++ online. FAZ , August 6, 2007, archived from the original on March 7, 2016 .;
  16. ITS annual report 2009; P. 11 pdf online (accessed on November 23, 2016)
  17. Link to the ITS online archive with all effects.
  18. Maurice Bonkat: I am so grateful. International tracing service hands over fountain pens. In: Voice & Way. 4/2012, pp. 8-9.
  19. (fr) Laurent Guillet: Il s'appelait Joseph. Editions Laurent Guillet, Limerzel 2011. ISBN 978-2-918588-03-0 . P. 327. (Camp stations of a French prisoner of war until his death, procedure for the research).
  20. Effects . January 24, 2017 ( its-arolsen.org [accessed January 30, 2017]).
  21. digitization of the archive its-arolsen.org, (accessed on 23 November 2016)
  22. The transmission of digital data (accessed on November 23, 2016)
  23. ^ Finding aids: Directory of subject areas.
  24. ^ Christian Groh and René Bienert: Results at the push of a button? The ITS digital archive - experiences and considerations. | Medaon. Retrieved January 30, 2017 .
  25. (en) Contacting the ICRC archives: Agency archives / Prisoners of war (prisoners of war)
  26. ↑ Submit search requests to the German Red Cross. Munich: missing, missing Second World War. Hamburg: resettlers, late repatriates.
  27. German Office (WASt)
  28. ^ Volksbund online search for graves
  29. C atalogue of C amps and P risons in Germany and German-Occupied Territories, September 1st, 1939 - May 6th 1945. Arolsen, July 1949. 1st Issue. Prepared by ITS, Record branch, Documents Intelligence Section (CCP)
  30. about the history of the document volume, initially (until 1990) only known within the authorities, as the content is too explosive, informs, even if this online source is difficult to read ( memento of the original from July 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: Der Archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 466 kB). The print editions 1989f. also the are Federal Archives (Germany) "Overview detention facility directories" known that here lists other sites, sorted by country @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.niqel.de

Coordinates: 51 ° 22 ′ 41 ″  N , 9 ° 1 ′ 9 ″  E