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Bad Arolsen opens Nazi archive

All in all, 30 million single sheets of paper supplying information on persecutees of the National Socialist era are kept in Bad Arolsen, among them the names of the persons mentioned in the famous “Schindler’s list”. In part, these documents are more than 60 years old and - as record of the human affliction under the NS-Regime - unique. Presently, all documents are in the process of being digitised and indexed for electronic use, with the data quantity comprising approximately seven terabyte. The digitisation of the documents facilitates answering personal inquiries of the haunted and their relatives and, on the other hand, access for historical research. In order to protect the originals, only persons directly concerned and their relatives as well as ITS staff have access to them.
“The digitisation of the data constitutes both a huge technical and logistic challenge. There are no comparable digitisation procedures in Western Europe or America in this scale that I know of,” IT expert Uwe Ossenberg says.
The opening of the archive for historical research is focussed on preparing the respective documents and creating the preconditions in Bad Arolsen for historical research and at the same time to transfer the data files to the member-states. Considering that most of the information is confidential, privacy protection regulations are to be observed. So to prevent that the persecutees of the National Socialist regime are further victimized, the states have agreed to handle the data in accordance with their respective national privacy protection legislation.
The Nazis were appallingly meticulous in noting virtually everything in the minutest details, ranging from hereditary disease in families to the number of lice on the head of a concentration camp inmate.
“The International Tracing Service keeps unique documents on the crimes committed by the Nazi regime. We like to place this information at the disposal of researchers allowing that it be historically analysed and written down for posterity. The International Tracing Service was established to provide information on individual fates and to reunite families after the war. The documents held here are a record of history. The ITS is going to assume more and more the tasks of an archive, so as to preserve the original documents for the future. Additionally, the information is made accessible to research by electronically registering and cataloguing the papers,” states the new ITS-Director Reto Meister.
For eleven hours, day by day, staff manually scan the historical documents on eight scanners. This way, 63 % of the holdings have already been digitised.
To enable the opening of the archives, the so-called “Bonn Treaty” had to be amended. All eleven member states (Belgium, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States of America) approved the amendment of the agreement. As soon as the ratification process is completed, the documents can be viewed by researchers in Bad Arolsen. Upon request, member states will receive electronic copies of the documents and archival material.