Arolsen Archives--International Center on Nazi Persecution

The Arolsen Archives are committed to preserving their unique collection of documents on Nazi persecution and to making them accessible worldwide. We search for the traces of victims and survivors of the National Socialist terror regime and, even today, we are still helping to reunite families torn apart by the Holocaust, the persecution of minorities and forced labor.

The documents of the Arolsen Archives offer enormous potential for research. We participate in conferences and workshops to establish good contacts with specialists from various disciplines and strengthen our international network. We also use publications and lectures to draw attention to interesting topics for research. Researchers receive the best possible support for their projects.

By keeping the memory of the crimes committed in the Nazi era alive and reminding people of the millions of victims, we also aim to increase awareness of antisemitism and attacks on democracy today. We support local educational projects and memorial initiatives by providing traveling exhibitions, teach-the-teacher workshops, online and social media offerings, as well as easy-to-use teaching materials.

The Arolsen Archives – International Center on Nazi Persecution formerly the International Tracing Service (ITS), in German Internationaler Suchdienst, in French Service International de Recherches in Bad Arolsen, Germany, is an internationally governed centre for documentation, information and research on Nazi persecution, forced labour and the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and its occupied regions. The archive contains about 30 million documents from concentration camps, details of forced labour, and files on displaced persons.[1][2][3] ITS preserves the original documents and clarifies the fate of those persecuted by the Nazis. The archives have been accessible to researchers since 2007. In May 2019 the Center uploaded around 13 million documents and made it available online to the public.[1] The archives are currently being digitised and transcribed through the crowdsourcing platform Zooniverse. As of September 2022, approximately 46% of the archives have been transcribed.[4] In 1943, the international section of the British Red Cross was asked by the Headquarters of the Allied Forces to set up a registration and tracing service for missing people. The organization was formalized under the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces and named the Central Tracing Bureau on February 15, 1944. As the war unfolded, the bureau was moved from London to Versailles, then to Frankfurt am Main, and finally to Bad Arolsen, which was considered a central location among the areas of Allied occupation and had an intact infrastructure unaffected by war.

On July 1, 1947, the International Refugee Organization took over administration of the bureau, and on January 1, 1948, the name was changed to International Tracing Service.[2] In April 1951, administrative responsibilities for the service were placed under the Allied High Commission for Germany. When the status of occupation of Germany was repealed in 1954, the ICRC took over the administration of the ITS. The Bonn Agreement of 1955 (which stated that no data that could harm the former Nazi victims or their families should be published) and their amendment protocols dating from 2006 provided the legal foundation of the International Tracing Service.[5] The daily operations were managed by a director appointed by the ICRC, who had to be a Swiss citizen. After some discussion, in 1990 the Federal Republic of Germany renewed its continuing commitment to funding the operations of the ITS. The documents in the ITS archives were opened to public access on November 28, 2007.[5]

Tracing missing persons, clarifying people's fates, providing family members with information,[6] also for compensation and pension matters, have been the principal tasks of the ITS since its beginning. Since the opening of the archives, new tasks such as research and education and the archival description of the documents gain more importance in relation to the tasks of tracing and clarifying fates. Since these new activities are not part of its humanitarian mission, the ICRC withdrew from the management of the ITS in December 2012.[5] The Bonn Agreement was replaced on December 9, 2011, when the eleven member states of the International Commission signed two new agreements in Berlin on the future tasks and management of the ITS.[7]

ITS was founded as an organization dedicated to finding missing persons, typically lost to family and friends as a result of war, persecution or forced labour during World War II.[6] The service operates under the legal authority of the Berlin Agreements from December 2011 and is funded by the government of Germany. The German Federal Archives are the institutional partner for the ITS since January 2013.

Organization
The organization is governed by an International Commission with representatives from Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, United Kingdom, and the United States. The Commission draws up the guidelines for the work to be carried out by the ITS and monitors these in the interests of the former victims of persecution.

The director of the ITS is appointed by the International Commission and is accountable directly to the commission. Since January 2016, Floriane Azoulay is the director.[2] There are about 240 staff employed by the ITS. The institution is funded by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM). ITS's total inventory comprises 26,000 linear metres of original documents from the Nazi era and post-war period, 232,710 meters of microfilm and more than 106,870 microfiches. Work is under way to digitize the files, both for purposes of easier search and for preserving the historical record. Since 2015, the digitized material is gradually being published on the archive's Digital Collection Online platform.[10]

The inventory is split up into three main areas: incarceration, forced labour and displaced persons.[11] The variety of documents is enormous. They include list material and individual documents, such as registration cards, transport lists, records of deaths, questionnaires, labour passports, health insurance and social insurance documents. Among the documents are also examples of prominent victims of Nazi persecution like Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel.

In addition to this there are smaller sections associated with the work of a tracing service: the alphabetical-phonetic Central Name Index, the child search archives and the correspondence files. The Central Name Index represents the key to the documents. With 50 million references on the fate of over 17.5 million people,[3] it is based on an alphabetic-phonetic filing system that was developed especially for ITS.

Finding aids
Making the inventory researchable for all historical issues is an urgent responsibilities after opening the archives. To date, the arrangement of the documents having been collected over a period of six decades was subject to the requirements of a tracing service, which brought families together and clarified the fates of individuals. The Central Name Index was the key to the documents, while the documents were arranged according to victim groups.

This principle no longer is sufficient, since historians ask not only for names, but also for topics, events, locations or nationalities. The goal is to compile finding aids that can be accessed and published online and are based on international archival standards. The first series of inventories could be published on the Internet (for the time being in the German language only). The documents were indexed according to their origin and content.[12] In view of the volume of the documents to be described, this process will take some years.

Copies made available
The International Commission at its May 2007 meeting approved the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's proposal to permit advance distribution of the material, as it is digitized, to the designated repository institutions prior to the completion of the agreement ratification process officially opening the material. In August 2007, the USHMM received the first installment of records and in November 2007, received the Central Name Index. Materials will continue to be received as they are digitized.[13