Horror and Hope: Studying the Holocaust

Bad Arolsen Journal

June 17, 2008

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.

All this is changing, as ITS transforms itself into an archive. Its leadership seeks 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.

This is quite challenging. Dr. Irmatrud Wojak, formerly of the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt, a fine historian and the new scientific director of ITS, welcomed us yesterday, and shared with us the challenges she and her colleagues are facing. Udo Jost, the longtime archivist at ITS, showed us around parts of the collection in this beautiful spa town in the rolling mountains of east Hesse. The holdings are immense, sprawling, covering 27,000 meters and numerous floors in several buildings. We saw examples of the 50 million different pieces of evidence on more than 17.5 million people during our first day – Nazi camp records, postwar Allied military records, records on the survivors and displaced persons, and more. We met some of the 300 staff.

Among our visiting group is Konrad Kwiet, Holocaust historian from the University of Sydney and the chief historian of the Australian War Crimes Commission, Susan Slyomovics, anthropologist from UCLA and daughter of Holocaust survivors, Jean-Marc Dreyfus, historian, from Paris and the University of Manchester, and Elissa Maelander-Koslov, an Italian and an anthropologist from the University of Erfurt. We’re assisted by some historians and staff from the Holocaust museum.

For some scholars, the interest is personal. Susan Slyomovics’ grandmother and mother were together in Auschwitz-Birkenau and then in a sub-camp of Buchenwald near Leipzig called Markleesburg. Idit Gil, of Israel’s Open University, is tracking a transport that took her father’s brother from Auschwitz-Birkenau to his death between Stuttgart and Bizenow in Germany near the end of the war. Alexandre Doulout is writing the history of deportation of his small town in the southwest of France.

For others, we’re already at work on projects that enable us to help ITS test the capacity of the holdings to answer questions scholars may have. Kwiet is tracking women who were held at Auschwitz.  Eric Steinhardt from the University of North Carolina is exploring the role played by East European Volksdeutch in Nazi activities. I’m interested in the rescue of children and youths at Buchenwald by elements of the German Communist-led international camp resistance. Yesterday, I spotted the boxes of materials that staff has set aside for me to look through later this week.

Our scholars are organized into four work teams corresponding with the ITS collection, and next week we will present our thoughts and insights to the ITS and to an audience of the international press. I am on the concentration camp records team and today we will begin to explore camp records – lists, books, files of materials on millions of individuals. It is a little overwhelming at this stage, daunting, and difficult. 

Our task is to help ITS transform from an organization that develops information on individuals, which underwrites what might be termed genealogy and biography, into an organization that works with scholars asking questions which produce history, sociology, and anthropology. From individuals and families and particular places, the interest is now shifting to generalization about lots of individuals and families and many places. History and its allied subjects focus on collectivities of people and on events in many places and across time. It is our challenge to learn quickly about what’s here and be as thoughtful and helpful to our hosts as possible. In that spirit, ITS wined and dined us last night. Later this morning, we go to work.

Ken Waltzer
Bad Arolsen, Germany

 

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