Operations
ITS’s total inventory comprises 26,000 linear metres of original documents from the Nazi era and post-war period, 232,710 meters of microfilm and more than 106,870 microfiches. Work is underway to digitize the files, both for purposes of easier search and for preserving the historical record.
The inventory is split up into three main areas: incarceration, forced labour and displaced persons. The variety of documents is enormous. They include list material and individual documents, such as registration cards, transport lists, records of deaths, questionnaires, labour passports, health insurance and social insurance documents. Among the documents are also examples of prominent victims of Nazi persecution, i.e. Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, as well as Schindler’s original list.
In addition to this there are smaller sections associated with the work of a tracing service: the alphabetical-phonetic Central Name Index, the child search archives and the correspondence files. The Central Name Index represents the key to the documents. With 50 million references on the fate of over 17.5 million people, it is based on an alphabetic-phonetic filing system that was developed especially for ITS.
After the end of the Second World War the main task of the ITS was initially to conduct a search for the survivors of Nazi persecution and their family-members. Now this accounts for no more than about three percent of its work, which is why the name of the organisation is no longer really up-to-date. However, a large number of new obligations have been taken on over the course of the decades.
These include certification of the forms persecution took, confirmation for pension and compensation payments, allowing victims and their family members to inspect copies of the original documents and enabling the following generations to find out what happened to their forebears. The service has responded to 11,8 million requests since the 1940s. In 2010, the number of humanitarian requests to the International Tracing Service remained relatively stable at just 855 requests per month. Overall, in 2010, the ITS received 10,265 requests from victims of the National Socialist regime or from families regarding the fate of 16,689 persons.
During the compensation phase of Eastern European forced labourers through the “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” Foundation between 2000 and 2007, around 950,000 enquiries were sent to the Tracing Service. As a result of this flood of enquiries, the ITS was tremendously over-extended. Consequently, this created a gigantic backlog, which temporarily did considerable damage to the standing of the institution. Especially enquiries, which had no direct bearing on the foundation, remained unprocessed. In 2008, the ITS was able to completely reduce the remaining backlog of enquiries.
On 28 November 2007 the ITS archives were made broadly available to the general public The ITS records may be consulted in person, or by mail, telephone, fax or e-mail; addresses and contact numbers are available on the ITS website . The mailing address is:
- International Tracing Service (ITS)
- Große Allee 5 - 9
- 34454 Bad Arolsen
- Germany
Making the inventory researchable for all historical issues is an urgent responsibilities after opening the archives. To date, the arrangement of the documents having been collected over a period of six decades was subject to the requirements of a tracing service, which brought families together and clarified the fates of individuals. The Central Name Index was the key to the documents, while the documents were arranged according to victim groups. This principle no longer is sufficient, since historians ask not only for names, but also for topics, events, locations or nationalities. The goal is to compile finding aids that can be accessed and published online and are based on international archival standards.
In 2010, the International Tracing Service took important steps to describe its archival holdings. The first series of four inventories could be published on the Internet (for the time being in the German language only). The documents were indexed according to their origin and content. Altogether nearly 3,000 archive units from ITS’s inventory have been catalogued. This corresponds to roughly five percent of the archive’s entire stock. In view of the volume of the documents to be described, this process will take some years’ time.
Read more about this topic: International Tracing Service
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