MSU Prof Explores Records of Nazi Atrocities as German Archive Opens Its Doors to Scholars

BAD AROLSEN, GERMANY (June 2008): When General Patton's Third United States Army liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp on April 11, 1945, American soldiers and visitors were astonished to find 904 children and youth—all boys in a men's camp—among the 21,000 surviving prisoners. Most were adolescents; many were younger than 12 years old. Among them were 16-year-old Elie Wiesel from Sighet, Romania, later a famous writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner, and 8-year-old Israel Meir Lau, later the chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Israel and recipient of the Israel Prize.

Discovering who these children were, what they experienced in the camp, and how they survived to be liberated is the mission of Kenneth Waltzer, director of Jewish Studies at Michigan State University.

His current book project, "The Rescue of Children and Youths at Buchenwald," traces the activities of an underground organization in the camp that helped the boys survive internment. Waltzer draws on interviews with former Buchenwald boys, now in their late seventies, as well as Nazi camp records preserved by the Red Cross's International Tracing Service (ITS). Among these records are transport and camp lists that provide the dates of arrival of prisoners, their ages and towns of origins, and their barrack assignments in the camp.  

Mapping the ITS Holocaust Archive

Until now, Waltzer has had to consult digital copies of the records in Jerusalem and Washington, D.C. This summer, he'll have the chance to see them firsthand—and in the process help provide a road map to the records for future researchers—when he takes part in an international workshop at the newly opened ITS Archives in Bad Arolsen, Germany, sponsored by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.   

"For more than sixty years, the Red Cross International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen has been just that -- a tracing service," says Waltzer.

”ITS staff has drawn on concentration camp records, forced labor records, and postwar displaced persons records deposited by the Allies after World War II to trace individuals and develop information responsive to requests made by survivors and their families. Scholars have not had access to the former Nazi records.

"All this is changing as ITS transforms itself into an archive. Its leadership wants to know from a group of visiting scholars sponsored by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum what uses we might make as new clients of the collections here; what opportunities for new research into Nazi activities, the Holocaust, and the experiences of victims they might offer; and what sorts of finding aids and priorities in developing these and what new investments should be considered to make the materials known and accessible."

With fifteen other scholars from North America, Europe and Israel, Waltzer will explore concentration camp, deportation, transport and ghetto records; forced and slave labor records; postwar displaced persons and migration records; and ITS institutional records in an effort to identify particularly rich new opportunities for scholarly research. The group will then produce a report and recommendations to be published by the museum.

Read Ken Waltzer's blog about his work at the ITS archives.

After World War II and the Allied liberation of the German concentration camps, German records were collected and subsequently deposited in the Red Cross archives. Until recently, only Holocaust survivors and former forced and slave laborers and their families were able to request records and only indirectly through the Red Cross; survivors could not see the records themselves and scholars were not permitted any access at all. 

A recent agreement among the 11 nations represented on a committee overseeing the archives now permits scholars to examine the materials and allows for the digitized distribution between 2008 and 2011 of copies of the records to key research institutions in these nations.

Among the records at the ITS are materials related to Anne Frank's deportation to Auschwitz, Schindler's List, numerous camp records and transportation lists, and lists of prisoners who were killed or subjected to medical experiments. Holdings include post-war interviews with newly liberated prisoners.

Waltzer will study these records to better understand the flow of people transported from factory labor camps and from death and concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Poland to Buchenwald (near Weimar, Germany) and their place in the history of the Holocaust and Nazi camp system. Such research will supplement his interviews with surviving boys who were liberated at Buchenwald or were there until near the end. 

"In this Internet age, it is relatively easy to find former Buchenwald boys, contact and interview them," Waltzer said. "They live mostly in the U.S., Canada, Israel, England, France, Germany and Australia. Many have written their memoirs in recent years, or made video testimonies, or engaged in Holocaust education. I have collected more than 80 memoirs and new interviews and there are more than 100 testimonies at the Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Archive and another 15 at the Holocaust Memorial in Australia. Being able to use the additional materials at ITS in Bad Arolsen will strengthen such memoir, testimony and oral history work and may suggest additional lines of inquiry about the experiences of youths in the camps."

Note to media: To reach Professor Waltzer, e-mail him at waltzer@msu.edu or call Kristan Tetens at (517) 355-5633. 

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