The International Tracing Service and the Bad Arolsen Archives

As early as 1943, the British Red Cross coordinated the first efforts to find missing persons in the territories recently liberated by the Allies.

In 1944, Allied military authorities took over the process: a Central Tracing Bureau was set up, and there was an increase in initiatives on the part of humanitarian organisations. For Jewish survivors, the World Jewish Congress, the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and the Central Committee of Jews in Poland attempted to systematically compile lists of survivors and to help locate relatives. These initiatives were supplemented by national offices established by states whose nationals—whether civilians, resistance fighters, or deportees—had been displaced by the war.

In 1948, the tracing service moved to Bad Arolsen, in the heart of the Western occupation zones and the future German Federal Republic, and was renamed the International Tracing Service (ITS). From 1955 onwards, the service was placed under the neutral supervision of the International Committee of the Red Cross, before being transferred to the German archives in 2012.

The ITS also preserves important archives produced in Western Europe by the institutions responsible for the supervision, administration, and guidance of populations displaced by war. After its creation in 1947, the International Refugee Organization (IRO), following the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), began a vast registration and retrospective survey of displaced populations in Europe that had requested assistance. These requests to be registered in the Care and Maintenance (C/M) programme led to the creation of thousands of familial application files, in which displaced individuals were asked to provide information on their civil status, social origins, and trajectory since the 1930s, as well as their plans for future migration. Whereas UNRRA seemingly proceeded with great haste, and supervised large groups, mainly in Germany, the IRO administered families and individuals throughout Europe and the world. The systematic registration of those protected by international organisations as “displaced persons” (DPs) produced many other documents, in particular individual cards with name, date of birth, a brief description, and sometimes a photograph. In addition to the card, which the bearer was required to carry at all times as an identity document, there were also registration cards in each DP camp. These contain additional information, including the group with which the person concerned was travelling, as well as the stated destination of emigration, which could vary according to the different registration points.

The archive website reflects the previous mission of the ITS, oriented towards searches for specific individuals. The digitisation of the ITS archives allows quick access to various documents. Only name-based searches are systematically effective, although searching by geographic, ethnic, and religious criteria is also possible. However, these criteria do not apply to all collections, and their cross-referencing can therefore provide only a partial overview of the populations searched for, with no guaranty of exhaustive results.

The Arolsen Archives helps grasp the consequences of Nazi violence as closely as possible—place by place and individual by individual—and to then follow the trajectories of persecuted and displaced persons step by step through Europe. The millions of files now accessible can help pinpoint the geography and temporality of wartime persecutions and post-war migrations. The millions of names, faces, and trajectories that these documents contain largely remain undisclosed.