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[Back] GENERAL DESCRIPTION The International Tracing Service (ITS) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) have prepared this On-Line Inventory of the Archives of the International Tracing Service in order to provide Holocaust survivors, their families, and other interested researchers with an overview of the more than 21,000 separate historical "collections" of documentary material that are contained in the archives of the International Tracing Service. Pending completion of formal approval procedures by the governments on the International Commission of the ITS and the International Committee of the Red Cross, the entire contents of the archives—and thus all of the collections of documentary material included in the present inventory—will be accessible for research at the ITS headquarters in Bad Arolsen and, in the form of digital copies, at the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and at several other research centers in Europe and Israel. During the period of time that is required to complete digitization of the entire ITS historical archives, some collections of material identified in the inventory will be available only at the ITS headquarters in Bad Arolsen. However, as the digitization of each major component of the collection is completed, those copies will be transferred to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and to other repository institutions in stages, so that over time a growing proportion of the documentation will be accessible in Washington and elsewhere. The major subsections of the archive scheduled for transfer over the next 2-3 years include the following:
Because this inventory is not the typical archival finding aid with which users may be familiar, a few notes regarding its origin, characteristics (i.e., what it is, and what it is not), and use are essential. The inventory is based on a list of collections maintained over the years by ITS staff to track a) the registration of Holocaust-era and early postwar documentation transferred by the Allied High Command for Germany in 1955; and b) the receipt and registration of additional collections of archival materials deposited at ITS in the more that five decades that have passed since that time. The ITS list of collections was thus organized chronologically by date of registration of each "deposit," starting with the massive deposits of documentation already accumulated by the time the Bonn Accords of 1955 were concluded, at which point the International Committee of the Red Cross assumed administrative responsibility of ITS. Since 1955, governments, private organizations, other archives, and even some private individuals have sent additional collections of documentary material to ITS, sometimes in the original and sometimes in copy form, and those very sizeable additional deposits were also recorded, chronologically by date of registration, on the ITS list of collections. ITS staff also copied some collections from other archives, and their addition to the collections was also recorded. Each discrete deposit of documentary material at ITS is thus defined as a "collection" in the inventory. Some "collections" thus have just a few pages, while others may contain tens of thousands of pages. In addition, documents of similar origin and type, that one might expect to be found in a single archival collection, may be located in more than one collection in the ITS archives. Currently, this inventory of collections is the only comprehensive listing of the historical collections in the ITS archives. Because of its origins as a registration tool, the inventory offers only a summary sketch of the contents of the archive, and regrettably not an in-depth view into the contents of every collection. It is not a complete catalog in the traditional sense, but rather a tool to begin exploration of the archive for the purpose of determining whether the information you seek or on the topic you wish to investigate may be contained there. This inventory does not identify by name all of the victims of National Socialism about whom the ITS archive contains information; searching this inventory for an individual victim's name is unlikely to produce a result. In the vast majority of instances, the inventory provides only a brief description of what a collection contains. Most descriptions consist of only a line or two, used by the registrar to identify the collection, rather than to describe its full contents. Thus it is possible, and even likely, that many collections contain materials of greater diversity and relating to more topics than the short collection description in the inventory indicates. While the descriptions definitely capture at least some dominant elements of the contents of a collection, it is not possible to determine solely from the inventory the full contents of many of the collections listed. That will be possible only by looking at the documents themselves once they are available, or once additional cataloguing is achieved. After the scanning and transfer of documents are completed, and with future software development, it is our hope that researchers who visit the repositories of digital copies of the ITS archives will be able to click on a collection description in the inventory and be able to view images of the files and individual documents in the collection. [Back] |