Horror and Hope: Studying the Holocaust

Bad Arolsen Journal

June 19, 2008

We’re beginning to see some of the potential of the ITS collection for new work on the concentration camps, their development, shift in size and function during war and empire, and the ways they used and treated prisoners. We’re also beginning to see some potential in the materials here for specialized work on practical day-to-day life in the camps, including the migration histories and demography of the prisoners. 

Yet we’re also seeing drawbacks – the unevenness of ITS holdings by camp, also the unevenness of materials themselves, some original, lots copied or microfilmed. Basically, we are also realizing ITS is organized to generate information about individuals, not topics and subjects, and not to provide professional services now being contemplated. We are also discovering an institutional culture where knowledge is specialized and implicit, and must be made explicit. How locate things? The finding knowledge and experience of the staff must be harnessed. How help transform an organization, and at the same time recapture and repurpose its expertise? 

Our colleagues think that the forced labor records, also organized by individual names, can potentially be cross-organized by town or place and by company. Lots of forced laborers worked for German firms in specific towns, and this history is not fully known or developed. Our colleagues also think the post-war materials about displaced persons organized by region can be a treasure trove for work on post-war migration. Those working on ITS administration think there is a history there to be tapped. My own group is still thinking about the camps. Some camps like Buchenwald and maybe Mauthaussen or Dachau are richly represented; but some are not, like Bergen Belsen or Auschwitz. This limits possibilities for doing comparative history. 

Reito Meister, the Swiss director of the ITS, spoke with us yesterday afternoon and asked us to help tap ITS’ potential as a possible archive, to help think about investments that must be made and things that must be done. Everyone realizes some materials are in rough shape in non-climate controlled rooms, sometimes laminated or held together by rusting clips. There is a reclamation project that must be embraced. 

Yet the stuff here is rich and we all keep finding powerful materials. This is the talk of the dinner or breakfast table. Yesterday staff assisted me to find a list of the 131 boys from Kovno, Lithuania, who on July 26, 1944 –after having been taken to Landsberg, a sub-camp of Dachau -- were sent by the Nazis from Dachau to Auschwitz-Birkenau to be killed. Only they did not die but instead were integrated into the camp. A large minority subsequently survived selections and, in 1945, many boys were evacuated to Buchenwald or Mauthausen. The list has the boys’ names, town of origin, and individual birth dates. About ten wound up among the boys assisted by the Buchenwald underground.     

Kenneth Waltzer
Bad Arolsen, Germany

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