Photo Gallery Putting Together History

The International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, set up after World War II to help the surviving victims of Nazi Germany find their families, is being turned into a historical archive that researchers say will convey the scale and the suffering to coming generations. Its vast vault of files is still helping to reunite survivors.
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After World War II ended in 1945, the Allies faced the task of repatriating millions of forced laborers and concentration camp survivors. They picked the sedate little town of Bad Arolsen in 1946, home to an SS officer training school, as the base for the ITS because of its central location between the four zones of occupation, and because it had come through the war with its infrastructure virtually unscathed.

Foto: SPIEGEL ONLINE
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The central register of names, the key to the 30 million documents in the vast archive of the ITS, the world's biggest archive of original documents relating to the Holocaust and the so-called Displaced Persons who were separated from their families in World War II.

Foto: SPIEGEL ONLINE
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Women prisoners from Auschwitz being transported to Germany to do forced labor. As the survivors die out, databases like the ITS will become even more important because of the silent stories they tell. Millions of personal fates are recorded in those yellowed, brittle documents, punched with cold bureaucratic typescript or scratched in shaky hand-writing by prisoners scared for their lives and stunned by their ordeal.

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After the war, any document that could be found with a name on it -- concentration camp registers, lists of forced labourers, Gestapo secret police records, birth certificates -- was carted to Bad Arolsen to create a database that now contains some 30 million documents on 17.5 million people.

Foto: SPIEGEL ONLINE
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The Red Cross was formally put in charge of the ITS in 1955 because the Allies still didn't trust the young West German republic to control an archive brimming with evidence of the nation's guilt. At the end of this year, the Red Cross will withdraw from the management, reflecting the gradual transition of the archive from a tracing service to a priceless, untapped source of material for historical research into the Nazi era, the Holocaust, and the immediate aftermath of the war.

Foto: SPIEGEL ONLINE
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Most of the archive has been digitized and is searchable through Bad Arolsen's computer database. It isn't available online yet. This is a prisoner card from Buchenwald concentration camp of Ludovic Lazar, a Hungarian Jew. His file was drawn at random during a tour of the ITS by SPIEGEL ONLINE. A subsequent search by ITS staff for other files on him in the archive traced the tragic final months of his life. Arrested in Cluj-Napoca in Romania on May 5, 1944. Transferred to Auschwitz on May 21, 1944. Moved to Buchenwald concentration camp on June 6, transferred on June 17 as a forced laborer to work in BRABAG near Magdeburg, a company that distilled gasoline from lignite. Returned to Buchenwald on September 28. Then taken back to Auschwitz on Oct 3. That is the last trace of his life. "He probably became unfit to work and was transferred back to Auschwitz to be murdered," said Kathrin Flor, the spokeswoman for the ITS. He was 55 and married. There's a note in the documents that says: "Relatives in Custody."

Foto: SPIEGEL ONLINE
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The ITS also holds some 2,900 objects taken from prisoners whose names it knows. It aims to return them to their owners or their descendants.

Foto: ITS
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The inventory of belongings includes many photos. Even after all these years, the ITS still helps reunite 30 to 50 families per year. It gets about 1,000 requests per month from people trying to find out what happened to their ancestors in the war. And actual tracing requests from Displaced Persons still account for around three percent of those enquiries.

Foto: ITS Bad Arolsen
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Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar. The ITS archive contains the camp's records. Bureaucrats often recorded the ordeals of the victims with chilling thoroughness. "Buchenwald concentration camp diligently updated its registers until April 10, 1945. It was liberated on April 11," said Kathrin Flor, the ITS spokeswoman. "They would fill out a prisoner's personal effects even if he had just come on a death march from Auschwitz and only had the rags he was wearing."

Foto: ddp
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An undated archive photo showing forced laborers from Dachau concentration camp near Munich producing weapons. Nazi Germany used millions of forced laborers to help keep its war machinery going. The ITS has helped many to apply for compensation from the German government by making original work records available to them.

Foto: DB/ picture-alliance/ dpa
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The archive contains this copy of a UN identity card issued to John Demjanjuk and declaring him to be a Displaced Person. Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was convicted in 2011 by a German court for his role in killing 28,000 Jews as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in during World War Two. He died in March 2012 in a care home in Germany.

Foto: dapd
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"I have no great fear that we will forget the Holocaust, you can't forget that, but there is a risk of the banalization of commemoration," Jean-Luc Blondel, the outgoing director of the ITS, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "I have heard many speeches on the memorial days like January 27 and November 9, they all sound very proper, but I miss the passion and the conviction. One talks about it a lot, but one doesn't think about it. That is why education is such an important part of our work now."

Foto: MICHAEL PROBST/ AP