International Tracing Service Research Articles

Women in child search: a gendered view of post-World War II reconstruction

ABSTRACT One of the most crucial sections of the International Tracing Service, centralized and established in 1948, was the Child Search Branch (CSB), which had the emotionally and ethically complex task of assisting ‘unaccompanied children’ who were discovered in far larger numbers after 1945 than anyone had expected. This article examines the role of three women relief workers who ran the CSB in the post-war period: Eileen Blackey, Cornelia Heise and Eileen Davidson. Focusing mainly on these exemplary cases, the authors evaluate and centre the women’s leadership and decisions, showing how women who worked for the CSB played roles that subverted the general rule in the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and its successor organization, the International Refugee Organization (IRO), which was that women were directed into ‘feminine’ posts. Women who ran the CSB played senior roles in child search and welfare and the decisions they took had significant and crucial outcomes for children, although gendered assessments of ‘carer’ and ‘feminine’ roles in UNRRA/IRO more widely have thus far hidden their activities as a subject worthy of analysis. This article shows how gender affected the spheres of influence the women carved out as they contributed to post-war reconstruction and humanitarian aid.

Exhibiting the Missing: The World Jewish Congress’ London Exhibition of 1947, ‘Search for the Scattered’

ABSTRACT In June 1947, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) launched an exhibition in London titled ‘Search for the Scattered.’ Some of the materials on display were loaned to the WJC by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA)’s Central Tracing Bureau (CTB), the predecessor to the International Tracing Service (ITS). The exhibition presented a detailed accounting of the vital work of both the CTB and the WJC. This paper argues, on the basis of the limited documentation that remains, that the ‘Search for the Scattered’ exhibition was a site of postwar knowledge production and transnational exchange that served a practical purpose: facilitating searching by addressing visitors as potential enquirers and reproducing the material culture of the search for visitors to view, read, handle, and understand. Like lists of names that were posted in DP camps, the exhibition can also be read as an early marker of the emotive power of name lists; in Leora Auslander’s words, commemorative markers of ‘a shared fate and common tragedy.’ Although tracing work has been infrequently a focus in the historiography of the Holocaust, the staging of this exhibition demonstrates early recognition of the significance of the WJC’s and CTB’s tracing work and the need for its wider acknowledgement, and suggests the reconstructive and restorative nature of the search itself.

Fella Feige Drut

This article is the story of Fella Feige Drut, who was born in Rovno, Ukraine in 1923 and who in 1939, at the age of 16, was arrested by the Gestapo in Würzburg, Germany because she was Jewish. She survived six years in various concentration camps and work camps, eventually ending up in the Theresienstadt ghetto. Here, she gave birth to a daughter. Her ordeal and that of her close family members are reconstructed using documents from the International Tracing Service’s (ITS) archive and from other sources. Unlike many of her co-religionists, whose family life ended during the Nazi years (1933-1945), Fella Feige Drut was able to live on. Her resolve manifested itself in her fight for compensation from the German government for herself and her daughter, despite the bureaucratic hurdles placed in her way, and her resolution to leave Germany and to build a new life in the USA.

The Politics of Removing Children: The International Tracing Service's German Foster Homes Investigation of 1948

AbstractAfter the Second World War, the International Tracing Service's Child Search Branch (CSB) responded to inquiries for missing children and, until 1950 when funding was stopped, searched for children ‘in the field’. As the Cold War set in, the US military authorities restricted the opportunities for such children, mostly Eastern European, to be removed from their German foster parents and returned to their countries of origin. In the spring of 1948, when tensions between the CSB fieldworkers and the military authorities were at their height, ITS appointed an experienced fieldworker, Charlotte Babinski, to investigate cases of children in German foster homes with a view to streamlining policy regarding child removal. Despite her findings, as monetary and geopolitical pressures increased, the CSB had to accept that many children of Eastern European origin would remain in Germany. Children were thus a battleground in the early Cold War, in which politics triumphed over ethics.

'Capturing Displaced Persons' Agency by Modelling Their Life Events: A Mixed Method Digital Humanities Approach

The International Tracing Service archives offer process-generated documents from resettlement programs for displaced persons (DP) after World War II. This paper addresses two key challenges to ongoing research based on those archival holdings: the generation of data; and the visual representation of that data in geographic information systems. Digital history offers the opportunity to go beyond case studies and use the wealth of process-generated documents as se- rial sources for algorithm-based analysis. However, data in that form does not exist as such, and thus needs to be generated – a process that implies interpre- tative acts such as abstraction, normalization, and trans-coding, which are shaped by the character of digital media. Can modeling a DP’s life into a series of events, and digitally processing the resultant data, help to find out more about the agency of DPs negotiating their destiny with the authorities? If the mostly hidden and implicit configurations of digital knowledge production are thoughtfully considered and geostatistical analysis is combined with close readings of selected source documents, hermeneutic and quantitative ap- proaches can be reconciled via digital history. This mixed method approach has implications for research culture and the publication of such data.

Machine learning, template matching, and the International Tracing Service digital archive: Automating the retrieval of death certificate reference cards from 40 million document scans

AbstractScattered throughout the International Tracing Service (ITS) digital archive, one of the largest and most heterogeneous collections of Holocaust-related material, are hundreds of thousands of reference cards to official death certificates recording a fraction of individuals who perished within concentration camps. These cards represent the most comprehensive collection of digital material pertaining to these death certificates issued by Sonderstandesamt Arolsen, a German civil registry office. However, the reference cards can only be found dispersed throughout the Central Name Index (CNI), ITS’s 46+ million-card finding aid that is indexed only by name. Consequently, aggregating the death certificate reference cards for research requires an intractable manual search. I adopt template matching and machine learning to automate the retrieval of these cards from the ITS digital archive. I demonstrate the efficacy of my method on a test set of 22,117 hand-classified cards, reporting 100% precision and 100% recall. Running this algorithm on 39,967,358 scans of cards from the CNI, I identify 312,183 death certificate reference cards in 13.75 days of elapsed real runtime on a personal computer with only a single, $600 Intel processor. Finally, I demonstrate that this approach can be generalized to many different card types within the CNI, showing great promise for application to other archives.

Nazi Persecution and Postwar Repercussions: The International Tracing Service Archive and Holocaust ResearchSuzanne Brown-Fleming

Nazi Persecution and Postwar Repercussions: The International Tracing Service Archive and Holocaust ResearchSuzanne Brown-Fleming

Women in the Archive: Locating the International Tracing Service in German Memory Work

The International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen is one of the largest collections of documents related to the Holocaust and Nazi persecution in the world. Originally set up as a tracing service to help provide information for survivors and family members of victims, it has become an invaluable centre for documenting Nazi persecution since it was opened to researchers in 2007. This paper analyzes the interaction of the people of Bad Arolsen with the ITS, which was set up in their small town without their consent. By focusing on the gender relations inscribed into the archive and on the way the people of Bad Arolsen interacted with the archive, I show how we arrive at an expanded notion of the archive on the one hand and at a more multi-dimensional understanding of cultural memory on the other.

Study of deaths by suicide of homosexual prisoners in Nazi Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Living conditions in Nazi concentration camps were harsh and inhumane, leading many prisoners to commit suicide. Sachsenhausen (Oranienburg, Germany) was a concentration camp that operated from 1936 to 1945. More than 200,000 people were detained there under Nazi rule. This study analyzes deaths classified as suicides by inmates in this camp, classified as homosexuals, both according to the surviving Nazi files. This collective was especially repressed by the Nazi authorities. Data was collected from the archives of Sachsenhausen Memorial and the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen. Original death certificates and autopsy reports were reviewed. Until the end of World War II, there are 14 death certificates which state “suicide” as cause of death of prisoners classified as homosexuals, all of them men aged between 23 and 59 years and of various religions and social strata. Based on a population of 1,200 prisoners classified as homosexuals, this allows us to calculate a suicide rate of 1,167/100,000 (over the period of eight years) for this population, a rate 10 times higher than for global inmates (111/100,000). However, our study has several limitations: not all suicides are registered; some murders were covered-up as suicides; most documents were lost during the war or destroyed by the Nazis when leaving the camps and not much data is available from other camps to compare. We conclude that committing suicides in Sachsenhausen was a common practice, although accurate data may be impossible to obtain.

The Memory of the Archive: The International Tracing Service and the Construction of the Past as History

ABSTRACTThis article examines the archives of the International Tracing Service (ITS) in light of recent debates concerning the implication of the digitization of archives for historical research. After a brief survey of the ITS’s history, it argues that although digitization brings in its wake certain problems for historical research – in particular the loss of serendipity and a thorough grounding in the culture of place – the ITS to some extent resists these difficulties. This is a result both of the transnational nature of the ITS’s vast documentary holdings and the fact that the ITS’s digital environment does not currently allow for fine-grained research of the sort that allows researchers to overlook the wider context. The article argues that recent ‘rational constructivist’ approaches in theory of history provide fruitful ways for making sense of the categories that are to be found in the ITS archives. It then goes on, through the use of as-yet non-digitized documents from ITS pertaining to Romanian Roma and Czech Mischlinge, to show that the ITS’s holdings offer great potential for writing a social history of the Holocaust, one that is sensitive to place and to the experience of the victims, even if that research often needs to make use of perpetrator documents. The aim of using non-digitized material is to show that as these documents are digitized, they lose none of their power to refocus the history of the Holocaust.

Alexander and Anastayzia: the separation and search for family among Europe’s displaced

In 1949, the child search branch of the International Tracing Service, set up after the war by the Red Cross and the Allies, began a search for the mother of a four year old boy, born to a forced labourer and left at a hospital in Rottenmunster at 8 months old. His file records first his abandonment, then his mother's strong resistance to external pressure to sign his adoption papers. His later attempts to trace his mother is also recorded. Taken together, the records shed light on the history of Nazi slave labour, lost children, forced adoptions, exile and the search for identity that connected episodes of displacement for many DPs that ended up in Australia. This article examines this history, and also considers the role of the archive as a powerful source for both enabling and disabling the search for family in the decades following the Second World War.

“The Greatest Detective Story in History”: The BBC, the International Tracing Service, and the Memory of Nazi Crimes in Early Postwar Britain

Alan Burgess's 1950 BBC radio play, The Greatest Detective Story in History , presented a moving and insightful analysis of the work of the International Tracing Service (ITS) and revealed how much was known about the crimes of the Nazis so soon after the war. This article uses Burgess's play in order to focus on the operation of the ITS's child search branch and considers why the work of the ITS was deemed an appropriate topic for a radio drama in Britain in 1950. It argues that, despite the limits of its analysis and adherence to culturally familiar narrative frameworks and conventions, Burgess's play captures the ways in which the Third Reich was understood in Britain in the postwar years: as a vast act of criminality which the British could proudly claim to have helped to destroy. The play also reminds us of the postwar moment when Britain was proud to be involved in international organizations and when rebuilding Europe was perceived to be in British interests.

Student to Scholar: Coming of Age at the GSA

Student to Scholar:Coming of Age at the GSA1 Suzanne Brown-Fleming (bio) In October 2001, for the German Studies Association’s twenty-fifth annual conference held in Washington, DC, I delivered my first professional paper on what would become my first book. I remember feeling extremely nervous as I gave my paper on “Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Germany,” for, as is often the case at the GSA, one of the most respected senior scholars in the field of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holocaust, Michael Phayer, would deliver the response to my paper in front of a full and engaged audience. Still a PhD candidate in Modern German History at the University of Maryland-College Park at that time, very green, and in the midst of what is still a fractious scholarly debate on the role the church played in the Nazi and postwar era, I could not imagine that over the next dozen years, I would finish my dissertation, find employment, write a book, write another, and become completely comfortable in the network of scholars serious about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The German Studies Association annual meetings were integral to these developments. Over the next decade, each year at the German Studies Association, in wonderful cities like San Diego, New Orleans, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Oakland, and Kansas City, I participated in panels and roundtables with scholars whose work I had read in graduate school and whom I never dreamed would be accessible to me. But accessible they were, and it became a typical pattern to deliver papers with other younger scholars trying to establish themselves and always benefitting from the graciousness of more seasoned figures in the field to chair the panel or deliver the comment. In 2002, Doris Bergen commented on my panel and it is through that relationship that I became connected with the press that published my first book. In 2003, Gerhard Besier and Robert Ericksen invited me to be part of a panel, and through those relationships I became part of the editorial board of the Contemporary Church History Quarterly. So many other meaningful professional relationships with scholars of Nazi Germany grew and were cultivated at the German Studies Association annual meeting, and I could always count on Gerhard Weinberg’s postbanquet gathering to be sure I engaged with them all. [End Page 679] Over the last fifteen years, I have looked forward to those amazing four days during which I could connect with colleagues, hear about fresh new work on the Holocaust, the Nazi era, and the churches, and, as the years roll by, provide to younger scholars some of the important mentoring that was so freely given to me. The German Studies Association annual meeting has always been a sort of oasis and crucible to test new ideas. Most recently, I have been a participant on panels and roundtables related to the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen, Germany, which was, until November 2007, the largest closed Holocaust-related archival collection in the world. Recently inscribed into the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Memory of the World Register, the size and scope of the collection staggers the imagination. The ITS holdings contain information about millions of people subject to incarceration, forced labor, displacement, or death as a result of World War II; their persecutors; witnesses and accomplices; and the countries and agencies who addressed their needs at war’s end. The German Studies Association itself played a role in opening this critical archive, calling for access to scholars in an official brief issued by the GSA archives committee. As I look forward to the next fifteen years and many more new cities and fresh faces at the German Studies Association annual meeting, I know I will have a receptive audience with which to explore this new trove of documents, numbering in the millions of pages, and will be able to entice others to do the same. I hope that I can offer future generations what was offered to me at each annual meeting: friendship, collegiality, intellectual generosity, curiosity, and fresh ideas for our field going forward into the twenty-first century...

Genealogy in the Jewish Library: An Update

In 1992, Judaica Librarianship featured an article by Zachary Baker, entitled “What We Owe the Genealogists: Genealogy and the Judaica Reference Librarian.” He followed it up in 2003 with an article in Slavic & East European Information Resources entitled “Resources on the Genealogy of Eastern European Jews.” The present article provides an update on the resources available to Jewish genealogists today, with particular emphasis on print and online resources that are recommended for the smaller Judaica library. It lists some of the sources in Baker’s article that have been updated and some that have gone online. It describes JewishGen, Routes to Roots, the Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute, the Family History Library, the International Tracing Service, and PERSI, the comprehensive index to genealogical serials. It emphasizes the importance of local genealogi- cal societies and their newsletters.

Vapniarka: The Archive of the International Tracing Service and the Holocaust in the East

Most scholars familiar with the vast holdings that constitute the International Tracing Service archives have assumed that thesewere helpful primarily for the study of the Holocaust and its aftermath in Western and Central Europe. The author of the following study shows that these holdings offer substantial resources for students of Eastern Europe as well. In the first part the author explains why this is so, and in the second part moves on to a case study of a camp that the Romanian occupation maintained at Vapniarka in Transnistria. This case study draws upon other archival sources as well, demonstrating how ITS holdings complement other research resources, adding new dimensions to our understanding of the Holocaust in the East.

International Tracing Service: ‘Respect for the past, responsibility for the future’

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Locating Agency

IntroductionThe world is on fire. Societies all over the world struggle incessantly and aggressively over the control of information to shape commonly held understandings of the present and the meaning to be derived from the past. These constructions and reconstructions have the potential to both legitimate and operate in opposition to structures of domination and injustice. Such dynamics feature regularly in the mass media. Consider the following:* Scholarly access to the world's largest Holocaust archives- the International Tracing Service (ITS)-had, until recently, been denied for over sixty years. This is remarkable given that these files were likely to reveal the names of unknown victims and shed new light on the structure and administration of forced labor and extermination camps.* Japan's ongoing struggles to remove from its high school textbooks long acknowledged responsibility for major war crimes committed by the Imperial Army during World War II.* How political considerations regularly confound attempts in the U.S. to formally recognize the Armenian genocide of the early twentieth century. Turkey continues to forcefully deny its responsibility for this genocide, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and uses its geostrategic importance to the U.S. to defeat recognition.* Key portions of Serbia's military archives from the Bosnian war were withheld from the International Court of Justice, leading several insiders to comment that such secrecy helped to absolve Serbia from charges of genocide and exempt it from monetary reparations.* Access to Bulgaria's cold war intelligence archives was contested amidst charges that they would identify current political and business leaders as collaborators with the communist era security services.* Brown University recently mined its archives as part of an effort to investigate its historical culpability in slavery and the slave trade. It launched a series of public events to stimulate discussion on institutional responses to the relationship between the present and past injustices.* In 2006, a U.S. National Archives audit found that up to one-third of 25,000 documents secretly removed from public access at its facilities since 1999 were inappropriately re-classified by various agencies.What is striking from these examples is not isolated to their profound nature. Equally remarkable is their ordinariness. A myriad of similar struggles could have easily been highlighted. The intersection among archives, professional ethics, archival praxis, the agency of individual archivists, and struggles for social justice is constantly at play across the globe. In such settings, archives and archivists can serve as instruments for sustaining, undermining, and challenging power and injustice. Yet, normative discussions of archival ethics largely evade these issues, and the promulgation of professional codes of ethics provides little value for understanding and reacting to these complexities.Given these evasions, this paper examines how voices within disciplines external to archives have engaged their own professional ethics as a means for illuminating these deeper issues. It notes how they have done so by recognizing and acknowledging professional ethics as a terrain far more complex and difficult than normative constructions allow. Although I point to this problematizing of professional ethics witnessed in anthropology, sociology, business, medicine, bioethics, philosophy, communications, history, post modernism and even the maturing ethics practitioners profession, I do not offer their insights as direct analogies to archival contexts per se. Instead, I contend that these literatures and discourses can assist the archival profession in deepening and enriching its construction and reconstruction of professional ethics. This knowledge and insight is organized along a number of key themes: professionalism; professional codes of ethics; professional and individual psychological connectedness; historically informed analyses, and strivings towards social justice, which is given sustained treatment. …

Lost Children: Displacement, Family, and Nation in Postwar Europe

At the end of the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of children were missing. Their faces adorned Red Cross posters, under the banner “Who knows our parents and our origins?” Whether through bombings, military service, evacuation, deportation, forced labor, ethnic cleansing, or murder, an unprecedented number of children had been separated from their parents during the war. The German Red Cross received over 300,000 requests to trace missing children or parents between 1945 and 1958, while the International Tracing Service traced 343,057 lost children between 1945 and 1956.1 The problem of reuniting families after World War II proved to be more than a daunting logistical puzzle, moreover. Although they represented only a small fraction of the millions of displaced persons (DPs) in postwar Europe, so-called lost children held a special grip on the postwar imagination. They stood at the center of bitter political conflicts between military authorities, German foster parents, social workers, Jewish agencies, East European Communist officials, and DPs themselves, all of whom competed to determine their fates. These battles were linked, in turn, to emerging ideals of human rights, the family, democracy, child welfare, and the reconstruction of European civilization at large. In the words of Vinita A. Lewis, an officer with the International Refugee Organization (IRO) in Germany, “The lost identity of individual children is the Social Problem of the day on the continent of Europe.”2 Following the Second World War, Europe appeared to be a civilization in ruins. American, British, and emigre humanitarian workers often arrived on

50th Anniversary of the ITS: The International Committee of the Red Cross and the International Tracing Service in Arolsen

The International Committee of the Red Cross was very pleased when the management and administration of the International Tracing Service (ITS) were transferred to it on 6 June 1955. In his address during the signing ceremony, the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Mr. Konrad Adenauer, congratulated the ICRC on its willingness “to take over this task in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva Conventions”. In reply the President of the ICRC, Mr. Paul Ruegger, thanked the Federal German Chancellor and representatives of the member States of the International Commission for the ITS for the reliance placed in his institution.

50th Anniversary of the ITS: International Tracing Service: 50 years of service to humanity

Though half a century old this year, the International Tracing Service has lost none of its relevance. In its 50 years of service to humanity, it has clarified the fate and whereabouts of thousands of people, reunited separated families and helped — to the extent that such a thing is possible — to make good the wrong done to those persecuted by the Nazis.