December 03, 2007
International Tracing Service Opens Holocaust Archive to the Public
By Vernon Horn
The International Tracing Service’s archive of Nazi documents, located in the town of Bad Arolsen, Germany, is now open to the general public. The archive contains more than 50 million pages in 21,000 separate collections pertaining to Holocaust victims. Three major types of records can be found in the archive: camps, transports, ghettos, and arrest records; forced and slave labor records; and displaced person records.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) is hosting a searchable version of the inventory with descriptions in both English and German. Due to the overwhelming amount of records, and the difficulty in digitizing them, no plans currently exist to digitize the entire collection. We previously reported on the archive here.
Resources
- The archive’s web site is: http://www.its-arolsen.org/
- The U.S. Holocaust Museum’s searchable inventory is available at: http://resources.ushmm.org/itsinventory
- USHMM also maintains an informative list of frequently asked questions about the collection at:
http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/its/faq/
