An aid used by the International Tracing Service (ITS) to find general information on incarceration and persecution sites of the Nazi regime was published on the EHRI portal in May 2016. The physical finding aid – a card index – had been compiled gradually between the years 1970 and 1982 and served primarily as a search tool for ITS staff members. The German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft – DFG) supported its retro-conversion to serve as an online finding aid.

“General Documents” collection

In view of the fact that Buchenwald and Dachau were the only concentration camps from which the documents were transmitted almost in their entirety, the “General Documents” collection was created to help close considerable gaps in the documentation of camp histories. The collection was used as a basis for evaluation and groundwork by other ITS departments. The documents contained in this collection either originated directly with National Socialist authorities and organizations or were created and compiled by the Allies and humanitarian aid organizations after the liberation. Documents added later were received from administrative offices (e.g. the Central Office of the State Justice Administration in Ludwigsburg), private institutions, archives (e.g. federal archives and the Institute of Contemporary History) and individual persons, and through specific document acquisition carried out by ITS staff members until 2006. Copies can be found among the documents of this collection as regularly as among other ITS collections.

The “General Documents” collection includes, among other things, correspondence, decrees and orders from the Central Reich Security Office (RSHA) and the Central SS Economic and Administrative Office (SS-WVHA), and general and statistic commands and orders from individual concentration camps. It also contains reports on the conditions in the prison camps and on witnesses’ fates collected by attorneys after the war.

The card index

The “General Documents” do not adhere to any specific physical order. To support the purpose of responding to inquiries more quickly, it was therefore structured according to content. To do justice to the specific needs of a tracing service, a German-language finding aid was created, containing descriptions of document types ranging from individual documents such as letters to entire files. The card file offered four means of access: a subject card catalog, a filing location card catalog, an issuer and provenance card catalog and an addressee card catalog. The subject card catalog was retro-converted. It is structured by a multilevel classifi-cation on the following superordinate topics: concentration camps, SS construction brigades, SS iron construction brigades, extermination camps, youth protection camps, police detention camps under the command of the security police, forced labor camps for Jews, ghettos and a chronological index.

The index cards themselves as well as the digitized finding aid offer insights into the work of a tracing bureau and its need for background information. Created by ITS staff between 1970 and 1982, the finding aid describes the content of 640 boxes of the “General Documents” collection. By 2006, the year the ITS completed its program of acquiring documents, the collection had increased to 1,820 boxes. Between 2009 and 2011, the ITS holdings were restructured and different parts of the “General Documents” were incorporated into the corre-sponding concentration camp collection. The collection was moreover digitized and its digital reproduction made available to ITS visitors through the institution’s digital database system

Public value

The ITS is in the process of becoming a documentation center open to different kinds of users. Some user groups need subject-related descriptions of the ITS holdings to find answers to their research questions. This kind of description can be offered by old finding aids like the retro-converted one, or by new archival finding aids. The documents which were acquired from several different organizations such as the federal archives of Germany or the Institute for Contemporary History (IFZ), etc. in several types of media (copies, originals) make the ITS holdings a unique source of information on issues concerning the Holocaust and Displaced Persons.

To provide access to this exceptional source of information, the ITS retro-converted this finding aid with the support of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and published it on the EHRI portal in May 2016: Finding Aid on the EHRI Portal.

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Jörn Kischlat – International Tracing Service (ITS), Bad Arolsen

Images: ©ITS