Arolsen Archives
30 million files document Nazi crimes
The Arolsen Archives are a center for documentation, information and research on National Socialist persecution. photo
© Swen Pförtner/dpa
The Arolsen Archives are the world’s largest archive of the victims and survivors of the Nazi regime. The facility has set itself the task of keeping the memory alive.
Nicole Dominicus fishes a brown envelope out of a plethora of brown envelopes that are stored in one of the countless closets at the Store Arolsen Archives. “The individual records are the most impressive,” she says. The head of the department, who is responsible for the stocks of the Arolsen Archives in Bad Arolsen in northern Hesse and their care, pulls out a “prisoner personal card”. On a small black-and-white photo attached, a boy can be seen – his hair shaved short, in prisoner’s clothing with a prisoner number. He smiles.
Johann Herak, born on July 23, 1927 in the Czech Republic, 1.40 meters tall, can be seen on the index card. According to this, as a 16-year-old he had to do forced labor in the Auschwitz concentration camp before he was transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp on April 16, 1944. “Reason: work-shy Czech – Gypsy” is noted on the document. “The documents also show that after his liberation from Mittelbau-Dora he was taken to Illfeld, died there and was buried on April 21, 1945,” explains the spokeswoman for the Arolsen Archives, Anke Münster.
Documents about Holocaust victims
The facility, which has 215 employees, is considered the world’s most comprehensive collection of the victims of Nazi crimes. It was founded in 1948 under the name International Tracing Service (ITS). In 2019 it was renamed the Arolsen Archives. The archive contains more than 30 million documents about Holocaust victims, concentration camp prisoners, Nazi forced laborers and survivors. They are part of the Unesco world documentary heritage, as is the so-called Central Name Index (ZNK) with around 50 million index cards that have been created over time and provide information on 17.5 million people.
In the pre-digital era, the file could be used to check whether and which documents on individual people were kept in the archive. At the end of the 1990s, the ZNK was digitized. More than three million people worldwide have turned to the Arolsen Archives with questions since it was founded 75 years ago. A look at the archive, which is housed in an industrial hall until the planned new building, at least gives an idea of the almost incomprehensible dimensions of the crimes of the Nazi regime. According to Münster, files, index cards and lists fill 22,000 running meters of shelves and cupboards. The meticulousness of the perpetrators in documenting their victims is shocking.
Core task and new orientation
For decades, the institution’s core task was to clarify fates and search for missing persons. “We used to not be an archive, but an information center,” says Münster. The collection remained closed to the public for a long time. “From the late 1970s to the 2000s, the archive of what was then the International Tracing Service was not accessible for historical research,” reports Jens-Christian Wagner, Director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation.
That has changed completely in the past 10 to 15 years. “Most of the documents from Arolsen are now accessible online – a research option that we use almost every day at the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora memorials.” According to Wagner, there are over a million documents in Arolsen on the Buchenwald concentration camp alone. “Researching the history of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora concentration camps is unthinkable without Arolsen.” For publication and exhibition projects, the foundation has been making extensive use of the holdings from Arolsen for years.
Today, the Arolsen Archives, which are financed from the budget of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, see it as their task to make the documents accessible to the general public. “We are happy to offer access to our documents. Anyone who wants to can come and look at them or use our digital archive,” emphasizes Münster.
accusations
Allegations against the management of the Arolsen Archives recently made negative headlines. According to media reports, 25 former and current employees in the directorate had accused bullying, abuse of power and sexism. In a letter, they addressed Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth (Greens) and the International Committee (IA). The supervisory board of the Arolsen Archives with representatives from 16 nations then commissioned an investigation by an independent law firm. It should initially cover the entire seven-year term of office of the accused directorate. On Tuesday, however, the IA announced that the investigation would be limited to a period of two years.
According to media reports, there is now another letter from employees to IA and Roth. However, a spokesman for Roth did not want to comment on the details: “The authors of the letter have asked the Minister of State for confidentiality. Accordingly, she will not comment on the content of the letter publicly.”