Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum #90250, courtesy of NARA.
Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum #69136, courtesy of Israel Press Office.
Kenneth Waltzer, director of Jewish Studies at Michigan State University, records his thoughts and impressions as he participates in
a research workshop at the ITS Archives in Bad Arolsen, Germany, sponsored by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
To reach Professor Waltzer during the workshop (June 16-26), e-mail him at waltzer@msu.edu or call Kristan Tetens at (517) 505-0880.
Things went well with our reports to ITS and to visiting press during a long, muggy, and rainy day today. My colleagues were upbeat, positive, and detailed and did great jobs describing parts of the collection – camp records, forced labor records, displaced person records, and general records – and then exploring small projects they carried out or that should be done in the future. The general thrust of presentations was that the collection is a goldmine for doing certain research (not all kinds), and that there ought to be attention at ITS to linking or bringing parts of the archive together that once were united. Go to full journal entry...
The time has gone very quickly here in Bad Arolsen – curious, because this is a really quiet German town. We’ve all spent our time actively exploring the ITS collections, meeting and speaking with ITS staff, and getting ready to report. This occurs tomorrow, then Thursday will be our last day with a final discussion, and we will then head in different directions. Go to full journal entry...
It was back to work in the Red Cross ITS archive today and the beginning of a countdown to when we make presentations to the Red Cross archive staff, Paul Shapiro of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies and CAHS staff, and the international press. Go to full journal entry...
Today we took a day off from work in the ITS archive and traveled north to Bergen-Belsen, former Nazi concentration camp site, where a new museum opened this past fall. Go to full journal entry...
Yesterday I followed the trail of the Kovno boys again from Dachau to Auschwitz and to Buchenwald or Mauthausen. I was testing whether I could get inside the Mauthausen camp in the same way I can inside Buchenwald. Go to full journal entry...
We’re beginning to see some of the potential of the ITS collection for new work on the concentration camps, their historical development, shift in size and function during war and empire, and the ways they used and abused prisoners. Go to full journal entry...
Yesterday my team members began working with the incarceration collections during World War II. The collection holds information on Gestapo activities and prisons, on a range of concentration camps and prisoners, and on some death camps. Go to full journal entry...
For more than sixty years, the Red Cross International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen has been a "tracing service." 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. Go to full journal entry...
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