Last month I had the pleasure of attending a week-long conference in London, hosted by the Weiner Library on the subject of the use of the records of the International Tracing Service (ITS) in advanced Holocaust study. I was shocked by what I learned there about ITS, and I share the story of the Archive and it’s opening here with the CEU community.
Some of you may be familiar with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. The Museum has worked to collect material concerning the Holocaust from over 40 different countries on every continent and now contains some 60-65 million documents. There is one archive, however, that contains over 100 million documents relating to the fates of at least 17 million victims of Nazism. These include 13 and a half million concentration camp documents, transport and deportation lists, Gestapo records and prison records, as well as 11 million pages of forced and slave labour documentation. Add to that 3 million Displaced Persons registration cards and files, thousands of first-hand testimonies of liberated concentration camp survivors and millions of files containing enquiries from around the world seeking information about loved ones. This extraordinary repository is the ITS Archives, and for 6 decades, it was kept under lock and key. The story behind the opening of the ITS archives only a few short years ago is an extraordinary one, and one I still struggle to believe. The governments of 11 democratic countries (9 in Europe, as well as the United States and Israel), in co-operation with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) – who administered the isolated buildings containing the documents – were responsible for keeping the archive out of the hands of a dying generation of survivors, as well as researchers and educators. It sounds like a bad conspiracy theory, and yet, that was the shocking reality.
These were the documents Allied forces collected in the process of liberation, and during the post-war occupation of Germany and Austria. As Paul Shapiro, the Director the Holocaust Museum revealed to us; thousands of files continued to be deposited into the ITS Archive right up until 2006, sometimes by governments who knew that if they put documents there, no one would ever see them. Even the location of the ITS Archives resonates with Holocaust-related history. Bad Arolsen, Germany, is a rural region that escaped heavy bombing during the Second World War, and had been the site of an SS training facility. As Allied forces approached, they used empty Arolsen buildings as a dumping ground for hundreds of thousands of files; the same files that survivors were not allowed to access and from which researchers were prohibited from viewing.
Much of the credit for opening the archive goes to Paul Shapiro, who was kind enough to relive the decade he dedicated to a very political struggle to enable access to ITS. At a meeting of the 11 member ITS governing board in Paris 2001, Shapiro first attempted to mobilise the Commission into opening the archive. He was shocked by the response, which was characterized by endless circular debate and even the consideration of anonymising all information the archive contained relating to dates, names and places – precisely the kind of information survivors wanted and needed. Suggestions like blanking out names and even the argument that any ITS user would have to purchase their own indemnification insurance, were undoubtedly calculated to prevent anyone from actually accessing the archive. With an extraordinary backlog of 450,000 requests for information from a dying generation of survivors still pending reply, the Commission still felt no urgency to act, and met only once a year.
Shapiro’s request for even a list of the collections at ITS met a stone wall. The ICRC denied that such a list existed – in what was later revealed to be a flagrant lie – in order to avoid any potential public pressure and even told Committee members they would deliberately slow the process of answering survivor queries if they formally backed opening the archive. Nor would the German government agree to release a list. When asking for information, Shapiro approached first the Commission, who referred him to the ITS director, who then referred him to bosses in Geneva, who then referred him to the German Interior Ministry, who then referred him back to the Commission- a perfect circle of unaccomplishment. Shapiro was with the only option of setting staff members at the Holocaust Museum to dedicate personal time to looking into the contents of ITS.
Meanwhile, the media was the only logical place to turn. In May 2005, a small article on ITS was published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, that then went viral. Eventually, influential German paper ‘Die Zeit’ agreed to publish a full-page article entitled ‘The Other Memorial’, identifying ITS as being as important as the memorial to murdered Jews about to be unveiled in Berlin that year, and labelled its inaccessibility a “scandal”. Internet petitions gathered thousands of signatures in only a few days. By June 2005, at the next meeting of the Commission, media exposure finally forced serious discussion on opening ITS. Still however, 4 countries; Poland, the UK, the Netherlands and Israel, remained silent on the issue, which worked against the effort. Germany even sough to assert national control, claiming that no other country had rights to the documents at ITS, despite the fact that over half of the archives contents were Allied property and the rest the war booty of the Third Reich (which is to say nothing of the question of the moral ownership of survivors). Shapiro himself became the target of absurd, leading questions, including ‘did he want to reveal there were Jewish homosexuals in the camps?’ ‘Wouldn’t opening the archives reveal that some Jews collaborated with the Nazis?’ The ITS’ official website went so far as to characterize Shapiro’s efforts as ‘legally and morally reprehensible’.
Nevertheless, a media storm was brewing and a growing number of editorials, including in publications such as the NY Times and Washington Post, started to talk about ITS. As Shapiro put it, the train was coming down the tracks and there would be no stopping it. France, Luxembourg, Greece, the UK, the Netherlands and the US all indicated support for opening the archives. Israel, Poland, Belgium and Italy remained silent or opposed. The position of Germany remained uncertain until Chancellorships changed. With the election of Merkel, German support was finally announced. An astonishing 6 weeks later (after so many years of battling) a draft agreement to open the archive was initialled by all Committee countries. 3 weeks later, the long-time director of ITS was fired. In November 2007, the final member state ratified the agreement, a shocking 62 years after the end of WWII and far too late for far too many survivors.
When I was introduced to the ITS archive in October, I was amazed to learn about its potential. It tells story after story; not grand strategy, but the human factor – and the terrifying routine of genocide and inhumanity. Its postwar documentation is unprecedented, and rich in so many survivor accounts and statements. It also contains proof of identities being changed after the war, information which knowledgeable researchers would have picked up as frauds had they not been barred from seeing the
I had the privilege of meeting a Holocaust survivor, who was able to learn through the records at ITS of the fates of his two sisters, whom he had assumed had perished in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. As ITS revealed, they had in fact died months later in an air raid, and were buried at a grave site that this particular survivor was now able to visit every year, and finally place roses on the graves of his family.
Hearing about the story of the ITS archive I was struck by how significant it is. Most obviously, it reminded everybody of the importance of information, and truth, for survivors and their families, as well as the memorial significance of not letting the stories of over 17 million human beings remain hidden and forgotten. The scholarly and educational potential of ITS is immense, and a goldmine for advanced research. The ITS archive also provides a fresh reminder of the fact that historical documentation is an essential tool, in this case one that could, should, have been tapped in order to provide justice for the victims of National Socialism. The fact it was not, should be read as a warning that even good governments can fail to give adequate support and attention to powerless voices. On a general level, ITS is 100 million documents that will now serve for all time as a potent weapon in the face of any Holocaust deniers or minimisers. It resonates into the present as a graphic portrayal of the failure to act, as well as the dangers of resurgent anti-Semitism. As ITS clearly shows, suffering during the Second World War did not stop with the Jews – well over half of the contents of ITS deal with the fates of non-Jewish victims. Anti-Semitism is dangerous for Jews, and is dangerous for everyone else – something we have a particular need to remember today.
Imogen Bayley, History, New Zealand
Picture: www.spiegel.de
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