Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust

ISSN: 2325-6249 (Print) 2325-6257 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rdap20

The Memory of the Archive: The International

Tracing Service and the Construction of the Past as
History

Dan Stone

To cite this article: Dan Stone (2017) The Memory of the Archive: The International Tracing
Service and the Construction of the Past as History, Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, 31:2, 69-88,
DOI: 10.1080/23256249.2017.1311486

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DAPIM: STUDIES ON THE HOLOCAUST, 2017
VOL. 31, NO. 2, 69–88
https://doi.org/10.1080/23256249.2017.1311486

The Memory of the Archive: The International Tracing Service

and the Construction of the Past as History
Dan Stone
Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article examines the archives of the International Tracing International Tracing Service;
Service (ITS) in light of recent debates concerning the implication archives; digitization; theory
of the digitization of archives for historical research. After a brief of history; Holocaust; social
history
survey of the ITS’s history, it argues that although digitization
brings in its wake certain problems for historical research – in
particular the loss of serendipity and a thorough grounding in the
culture of place – the ITS to some extent resists these difficulties.
This is a result both of the transnational nature of the ITS’s vast
documentary holdings and the fact that the ITS’s digital
environment does not currently allow for fine-grained research of
the sort that allows researchers to overlook the wider context. The
article argues that recent ‘rational constructivist’ approaches in
theory of history provide fruitful ways for making sense of the
categories that are to be found in the ITS archives. It then goes
on, through the use of as-yet non-digitized documents from ITS
pertaining to Romanian Roma and Czech Mischlinge, to show that
the ITS’s holdings offer great potential for writing a social history
of the Holocaust, one that is sensitive to place and to the
experience of the victims, even if that research often needs to
make use of perpetrator documents. The aim of using non-
digitized material is to show that as these documents are
digitized, they lose none of their power to refocus the history of
the Holocaust.

In Daša Drndić’s novel Trieste (published in 2007 in Croatian and 2010 in English), the
protagonist Haya Tedeschi ponders the disappearance of her son Antonio in April
1945. In 2006, she learns of the opening of the Red Cross-administered archive known
as the International Tracing Service (ITS), ‘the largest archive for World War II.’ ‘Few
people,’ writes the narrator, ‘know of Bad Arolsen’s vast functional archive, which
could bring succor to millions and disturb millions were it made available to the
public.’ On its sliding shelves ‘lurk unfinished stories, trapped fates, big and little personal
histories, embodied histories’ waiting to be discovered and liberated:
In Bad Arolsen, in this ‘library’ of horrors, in this alchemist’s kitchen of maniacs, little lives of
little people have been foundering already for sixty years; they are waving their deportation
I.D.s, their brittle, faded and cracked family photographs, their hastily penned letters, diaries,
their birth certificates and marriage licenses, their death certificates, sketches, poems, their
coupons for food and clothing, anything that can supplement their cry, they are waving:
Here we are, find us.
© 2017 The Institute for Holocaust Research, at the University of Haifa
70 D. STONE

She goes on, ‘The baroque palace in Bad Arolsen preserves, cleans, cleanses, fine-tunes in
its belly a city of paper, a paper city, a papier-mâché model of Europe, of life, of compacted
tragedies, gigantic tragedies squashed on to yellowed slips of paper.’ There is just one
problem: until now the archive has been closed, and the Red Cross ‘takes between three
and thirty years to find a concrete piece of information … .’ In 2006, upon hearing the
news about the archive opening to the public, Haya decides she must go to Arolsen for
herself.1 What is there?
The first part of what follows provides a brief history of the ITS. Existing histories are
either written very close to the documents, with a sense of the wider context missing, such
as Bernd Joachim Zimmer’s, or focus primarily on the geopolitical context in which ITS
was created and fought over, but largely neglect the ITS’s own understanding of its insti-
tutional development, such as Jennifer Rodgers’. I move beyond these to suggest that a
history of ITS that negotiates a path between both of these approaches, that provides a
sense of the ITS workers’ attitude to their humanitarian remit, and that provides a
history of ITS as an archive is required in order to make sense of what is there and
how to use it.2 Next, I make a start toward considering the nature of ITS as an archive,
indicating how an ‘archive biography’ of ITS, that is to say, a focus on the epistemology
of the archive and how that changes over time, will assist researchers in thinking about
how to approach such a massive and varied collection of material. In particular, I focus
on the ways in which the categories most often found in the ITS holdings should not
simply be taken for granted, but need to be historicized as coming into being alongside
the institution itself, simultaneously constituting ITS and defining its operations.
I then show how the digitization of these records generates both challenges and benefits
for historians, indicating that many of the shortcomings of digitization are, for the time
being, resisted by the complexities of searching in the ITS database. In particular, the
need for serendipity in historical research remains, coincidentally, ‘built in’ to the
current search function in a way that permits systematic, ‘big data’ analysis, but also
favors research that remains ethically attuned to the trajectories of individuals. This is par-
ticularly true when thinking about a social history of the Holocaust, one that seeks to trace
individual victims of Nazi criminality, even where doing so relies on ‘perpetrator’ docu-
ments. In order to illustrate these points, I turn to two documentary collections within
ITS. Here I have chosen documents that have not yet been digitized both to give a sense
of the scope of the ITS holdings and to argue that both specific and serendipitous research
will remain possible in ITS’s digital environment. To understand some of the recent dis-
cussions of digital historical representations, it is also necessary to consider them in rela-
tion to non-digitized sources, in order to think about how, if at all, they differ, or how
suitable methods that combine the ethics of fine-grained research with the systematic ana-
lysis of big data can be devised. In offering this brief survey – each of the sections will be
expanded upon further in the book on ITS that I am currently writing – I hope to show that
ITS has broad implications for Holocaust studies and for the writing of digital history.
With respect to the former, historians are only just starting to grapple with the ways in

1
Daša Drndić, Trieste, trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać (London: Maclehose Press, 2013), pp. 246–250.
2
Bernd Joachim Zimmer, International Tracing Service Arolsen: Von der Vermisstensuche zur Haftbescheinigung. Die Organi-
sationsgeschichte eines “ungewollten Kindes” während der Besatzungszeit (Bad Arolsen: Waldeckischer Geschichtsverein,
2011); Jennifer Rodgers, “From the ‘Archive of Horrors’ to the ‘Shop Window of Democracy’: The International Tracing
Service, 1942–2013,” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 2014.
 DAPIM: STUDIES ON THE HOLOCAUST 71

which ITS documents can supplement existing research, yet also have the potential to
ground new histories, especially those written ‘from below,’ that is, from the point of
view of the victims. With respect to the latter, ITS provides an important test case that
makes clear both the problems and potential of working in a digital environment.

What is the ITS?

Established by the Allies at the end of the war, the Central Tracing Bureau was run first by
Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) and then the Combined
Displaced Persons Executive (CDPX) of the Allied Control Council. It was handed over
to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in late 1945
and was then taken over by UNRRA’s successor, the International Refugee Organization
(IRO), which renamed it the ITS at the start of 1948. Equipped with many of the concen-
tration camp registration and transportation lists as well as many other captured Nazi
documents, the ITS set about tracing missing persons, helping relatives discover the
fates of their loved ones, and, in a remarkable enterprise of detective work known as
the ‘graves recheck,’ recreating the paths of the so-called death marches with the aim of
providing hygienic reburials, confronting locals with evidence of Nazi crimes, and
trying to establish who died where along the vast routes that saw camp inmates forcibly
marched across Central Europe as the Nazis tried to prevent them from falling alive
into the Allies’ hands.3 By the end of 1950 the process had brought to light information
on 155,093 Allied nationals.4
Located at first in Versailles and then, as the Allies pushed eastward, in Frankfurt am
Main, the ITS was relocated to Arolsen in 1946 and was run by the IRO from 1948.
Arolsen, as the ITS’s director, Maurice Thudichum, put it at the first conference of
National Tracing Bureaux held in the town at the end of September 1948, was ‘far away
from everything and near to nothing.’5 Yet although it had been a staunchly Nazi town,
dominated by the Baroque palace that had been the home of the aristocratic Nazi
Prince Josias zu Waldeck und Pyrmont, it was relatively undamaged, it was centrally
located between the four occupation zones in the north of Hesse, and the former SS bar-
racks provided suitable housing for the files.6 As it rapidly acquired more documents and
personnel, the ITS soon outgrew its quarters, and in 1952, now under the control of the
Allied High Commission for Occupied Germany (HICOG), it moved to a new,
purpose-built, modernist building on the Grosse Allee in Arolsen, where it remains to
this day.7 In 1954–1955, there were protests against the plan to hand over control of
3
Josephine Ulbricht, “Die Untersuchungen der UNRRA zu den Todesmärschen des KZ Flossenbürg,” Freilegungen: Jahrbuch
des International Tracing Service, vol. 1 (2012), p. 153.
4
The International Tracing Service: Brief History of its History and Activities (March 1951), 6.1.1/82493199#2, ITS Digital
Archive, Wiener Library, London. For a more detailed history, see History of the International Tracing Service, 1945–
1951, 6.1.1/82492910-82493191, ITS Digital Archive, Wiener Library, London.
5
Maurice Thudichum’s address at NTB conference, Arolsen, September 30–October 2, 1948, 6.1.1/82500531_0_1, ITS Digital
Library, Wiener Library, London.
6
On Prince Josias, see Jonathan Petropoulos, Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 261–266; Marc Hillel, Les archives de l’espoir (Paris: Fayard, 1977), pp. 21–34. For
the Allies’ deliberations on where to locate the Central Tracing Bureau, see the Minutes of the Working Group on a
Central Tracing Office, 6.1.1/82500209_0_1, ITS Digital Archive, Wiener Library, London.
7
Apart from Zimmer’s and Rodgers’ work, for histories of the early years of the ITS, see also Jenny Edkins, Missing: Persons
and Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), Ch. 3; Uwe Ossenberg, The Document Holdings of the International
Tracing Service: Using the Digital Archives in the Context of Their Creation and Evolution (Bad Arolsen: International Tracing
72 D. STONE

the ITS to the West German authorities with the abrogation of the Occupation Statute.
The plan was dropped, and with the Bonn Agreement of 1955, the International Commit-
tee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was designated as the administrator of the ITS, though it
would remain formally owned by an international consortium of nine countries.
Until November 2007, when it was forced to open the archive following sustained pres-
sure by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and other institutions,
the Red Cross ran the ITS as a tracing service, controversially aiding the West German
government as much as, if not more than, individual inquirers. In the context of the
Cold War, ITS provided ‘a humanitarian means by which to stave off Communist influ-
ence in Western Europe.’8 It assisted Bonn in its aim of rehabilitating West Germany as a
sovereign state and, thanks to the German Sonderstandesamt (special register office) that
was established there, provided indemnification certificates for reparations claimants. It
kept the archive closed to researchers, with only a few brief moments of relative openness
(notably during Albert de Cocatrix’s directorship, between 1970 and 1977, when French
historian Marc Hillel was one of the first researchers to make use of the ITS’s holdings9),
and maintained until 2007 that there was little of interest for historians and other scholars
in its holdings. When the extent to which this claim was untrue became clear, the Red
Cross, saying that managing a research archive was outside of its humanitarian remit, with-
drew from administering the institution at the end of 2012; the ITS is now run and paid for
by the German government on behalf of the 11 states that now own it (Poland and Greece
joined the original 9), and has been headed by an internationally respected historian, Rebecca
Boehling, and, currently, an experienced European administrator of international institu-
tions, Floriane Hohenberg. In its new incarnation as a research institution, the ITS promotes
the use of its resources through conferences for postgraduate students and established scho-
lars, has published a yearbook (Freilegungen) since 2014 as well as occasional studies (Fund-
stücke), offers an outreach program to schools and universities, and is currently developing
electronic resources.
With respect to tracing relatives, it is for the most part not necessary to travel to Bad
Arolsen (the town received the designation ‘Bad,’ which means spa, in 1997). Although
the ITS is still a tracing service – it receives 1000 requests a month from people looking
for evidence of their relatives from the time of World War II – some 85% of its more-
than-30-million documents have now been digitized, offering an unparalleled overview
of the extent of Nazi persecution of Jews and non-Jews. These records are available to
each of the 11 states that make up the international commission that owns ITS, and a
copy of the digital archive is accessible at designated institutions. For example, in
Belgium, it is the National Archives in Brussels; in Poland, the Institute for National
Memory in Warsaw; in the United States, the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington, D.C.; and in the United Kingdom, the Wiener Library in
London. Nevertheless, only when one visits Bad Arolsen does one really get a sense of
the truth of Drndić’s claim that the people represented in the archive are waving,
waiting to be found.

Service, 2009), Ch. 2; Henning Borggräfe and Hanne Leßau, “Die Wahrnehmung der NS-Verbrechen und der Umgang mit
den NS-Verfolgten im International Tracing Service,” Fundstücke 3: Die Wahrnehmung der NS-Verbrechen und ihrer Opfer
im Wandel (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015), pp. 23–44.
8
Rodgers, “From the ‘Archive of Horrors’ to the ‘Shop Window of Democracy,’” p. 9.
9
See Marc Hillel, Au nom de la race (Paris: Fayard, 1975) and, specifically on ITS, Les archives de l’espoir (Paris: Fayard, 1977).
 DAPIM: STUDIES ON THE HOLOCAUST 73

The ITS is both like and unlike other archives. All archives deal with people and their
affairs, whether official, bureaucratic, mercantile, religious, political, sporting, medical, or
a thousand other possibilities. In ITS, each slip of paper represents a life. This is most
obvious in the Central Name Index (CNI), the tens of thousands of boxes each containing
between 1500 and 2000 index cards referring to specific individuals, and in the Tracing
and Documentation (T/D) files, the files that have been opened on each individual for
whom a search request has been made since the end of the war, whether or not the
search was positive (i.e. the person was found, whether alive or dead) or negative (i.e.
the person could not be traced). These number in excess of three million, and to see
them on the shelves is breathtaking. Not just for their scale, but also because of what
they are and the fact that they have been there for so long for the sole use of the tracers
and largely inaccessible to outside researchers, the so-called Sachdokumente (factual docu-
ments) are also remarkable to see: thousands of boxes of documents, including deporta-
tion lists, concentration camp registration lists and records of German companies’ use
of slave labor. The DP2 cards, registration cards created when survivors were recorded
as displaced persons (DP), are equally powerful. These browning slips of paper not only
provide insights into the struggles faced by survivors in terms of national belonging
and desired place of settlement – the most fascinating field on them is ‘Claimed Nation-
ality,’ a phrase that is pregnant with implications – but also indicate that the individuals
concerned were undergoing a process of transformation. The DP2 cards are, as one scholar
notes, ‘mirrors of a transition process’ whereby Holocaust survivors were being trans-
formed, losing their prior identities as Romanians or Poles, acquiring an identity as a con-
centration camp survivor and hoping to acquire yet another identity in the near future as
emigrants, most of them to Palestine.10 Likewise, the more than 350,000 CM/1 cards, ‘care
and maintenance’ forms created by the IRO, which ran ITS between 1948 and 1951, offer
insights into the DPs’ tortuous and drawn-out postwar trajectories.11 Perhaps the most
affecting of all are the records of the Child Tracing Branch, a separate body within ITS
whose mandate was to repatriate unaccompanied children who had survived camps or
in hiding, as well as to locate and resettle children who had been, like Haya Tedeschi’s
son, stolen by the Nazi authorities to be ‘re-Germanized.’12

10
René Bienert, “Claimed Nationality – Desired Destination: Selbstdefinitionen von Shoah-Überlebenden im Spiegel der DP-
Registrierungsunterlagen,” in René Bienert, Manfred Grieger and Susanne Urban (eds.), Nachkriegswege nach Volkswagen:
Jüdische Überlebende zwischen Befreiung und neuer Identität (Wolfsburg: Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft, 2014), p. 32. The
German term is more poignant: Übergangsprozess indicates the temporal nature of a process of change, or ‘going over,’
more than does ‘transition.’ On refugee politics, see also Anna Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism:
Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011) and Gerard Daniel Cohen, In War’s
Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
11
For a more detailed guide to the holdings of the ITS, see Suzanne Brown-Fleming, Nazi Persecution and Postwar Reper-
cussions: The International Tracing Service Archive and Holocaust Research (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, in associa-
tion with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2016).
12
See Susanne Urban, “Unaccompanied Children and the Allied Child Search: ‘The Right … a Child has to His Own Heri-
tage,’” in Simone Gigliotti and Monica Tempian (eds.), The Young Victims of the Nazi Regime: Migration, the Holocaust
and Postwar Displacement (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. 277–297; Verena Buser, “Displaced Children 1945 and the
Child Tracing Division of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration,” The Holocaust in History and
Memory, vol. 7 (2014), pp. 109–123; Verena Buser, “‘Mass Detective Operation’ im befreiten Deutschland: UNRRA und
die Suche nach den eingedeutschten Kindern nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg,” Historie: Jahrbuch des Zentrums für histor-
ische Forschung Berlin der polnischen Akademie der Wissenschaft, vol. 8–9 (2015–2016), pp. 347–360; Verena Buser, “Die
‘Child Search and Registration Teams der UNRRA,’” Nurinst: Beiträge zur deutschen und jüdischen Geschichte (2016),
pp. 75–88.
74 D. STONE

A tiny proportion of the ITS’s holdings is made up of objects that belonged to former
victims of Nazi persecution. Though small in number, they are rich in significance, and
today the ITS is committed to giving them back to their original owners’ relatives. For
example, Norwegian journalist Fredrik Ekeli discovered that ITS held not only documen-
tary information about his grandfather Walter Brinchmann, who had been deported from
Oslo to several German concentration camps in 1943, but also his fountain pen, which had
been taken from him when he was transferred to Neuengamme. Seventy years later, Ekeli
held it in his hands.13 This process of returning objects where possible reflects another
crucial aspect of the ITS’s operations, a consequence of the Nazis’ criminal policies
(such as that described by Drndić) and the workings of the tracing process: the reuniting
of family members. Remarkably, this is a phenomenon that still occurs today, with some
moving stories coming to light in the process. Echoing Drndić’s novel, Antonia Memmin-
ger, a German pub owner, recently discovered that her biological father, an Italian forced
laborer named Antonio Metitieri, had another daughter, Gina, who was living in Italy,
and that they were therefore half-sisters; they recently met, thanks to the work of ITS.14
Even when the relatives being searched for are dead, often having died during or soon
after the war, for relatives using the ITS collections to trace the paths taken by their
loved ones, it is often the first time they have come to understand in any detail what hap-
pened to them.
When it comes to using the ITS collections for scholarly research, however, problems
immediately arise. The next section investigates what happens when, inspired by stories
such as Drndić’s or real-life encounters such as Ekeli’s or Memminger’s, one tries to
find out more. As soon as one starts to use the ITS holdings, one realizes that an engage-
ment with the history of the archive and its changing shape is a prerequisite.

Archives and histories

‘Generally speaking,’ write the authors of one study of archives,
an archive is no mere aggregation of documents: it is driven by its internal logic of selection,
classification, and organization, orchestrated to produce a single and coherent corpus. That is
to say, a set of regulatory concerns, aimed at achieving a measure of cognitive, ideological,
and affective commensurability, comes into play in the creation of every collection.15

If it is true, as Francis Blouin and William Rosenberg argue, that ‘access to sources opens
the possibility of teasing out their historical meaning only if a scholar understands what
the archivists and their archives have been up to, and the historical contexts in which
their sources were formed,’16 then for historians using the ITS, teasing out historical
meaning is especially challenging. Not only have the sources been, until recently, inacces-
sible, they are arranged in order to facilitate the tracing process and not historical research.
This has changed somewhat with the development of the digital database, which now
incorporates keyword searches and other useful tools, but it remains a hit-and-miss
13
ITS Annual Report (Bad Arolsen: ITS, 2014), pp. 57–59.
14
Ibid., pp. 49–51.
15
Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker, “Introduction: Moving Testimonies,” in Sarkar and Walker, (eds.), Documentary Testimo-
nies: Global Archives of Suffering (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 15.
16
Francis X. Blouin Jr. and William G. Rosenberg, Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 119.
 DAPIM: STUDIES ON THE HOLOCAUST 75

affair, with even experts who have worked at Bad Arolsen for 20 years or more sometimes
unsure how to conduct specific digital searches.17
The new digital landscape, which stretches beyond our ability to comprehend it, brings
many problems in its wake where the research and writing of history are concerned. The
authors of a study of the inter-relationships between archives and history note, ‘Rapid
changes have taken place in archival practices that have little or no relevance to current
historical conceptualizations.’ This means that ‘historians have become increasingly unin-
formed about what archivists have done and now do, and how past and future historical
documentation has been and will be acquired and preserved.’18 Archivists have indeed
been struck by a ‘virtual tsunami’ requiring ‘post-custodial paradigms.’19 Historians
now need to be alert to the provenance and scope of ‘digital historical representations’
that comprise the signs contained in the digital archive.20
ITS both reflects and evades these problems. It reflects them because the challenge of
digitizing such a vast collection in a way that renders it searchable and structurally
stable are obvious, yet evades them in that unlike, say, the archives of a present-day gov-
ernment department or a large firm, it is not growing exponentially (although it does grow
by a small amount each year). Blouin and Rosenberg write,
While historians continue to beat down archival doors in their admirable pursuit of all kinds
of history, new and traditional, the intellectual and administrative challenges of identifying,
selecting, organizing, and conceptualizing the archive as a historical source have become too
complex, and historical study has become too unstable, for historians to have much notion of
what the historical archives of the future will be like.21

These problems apply to the digitization of a massive collection such as ITS just as they do
to current, growing archives. ‘How the archivist forms and presents the historical record is
itself a historical problem,’ write Blouin and Rosenberg,
and future scholars are certain to face daunting tasks in understanding the institutional
values and contexts embedded in their archives and archival descriptions. They will only
have documents and descriptive materials in the quantity, form, and nature that archivists
have decided to give them, however these relate to the historical questions at hand. For archi-
vists and historians alike, here perhaps is the most important meaning of Jacques Derrida’s
multi-layered assertion that ‘archivization produces as much as it records the event.’22

Not the least of these problems is the fact that although it may be tempting to regard the
ITS holdings as comprehensive – they are certainly overwhelming, and it is impossible for
one researcher to read them all – that is not the case. ITS has acquired its vast holdings in
an ad hoc fashion from the start: from systematic attempts by the occupation authorities to

17
As became clear at the conference “Improving Access to the ITS Archives,” ITS, Bad Arolsen, March 21–23, 2016. See also
Elizabeth Anthony, “The Digital Transformation of the International Tracing Service Digital Collection,” in Andrea Pető and
Helga Thorson, (eds.), The Future of Holocaust Memorialization: Confronting Racism, Antisemitism and Homophobia through
Memory Work (Budapest: Tom Lantos Institute, 2015), pp. 46–51.
18
Blouin and Rosenberg, Processing the Past, p. 6.
19
Ibid., pp. 9, 63.
20
See Kate Theimer, “A Distinction Worth Exploring: ‘Archives’ and ‘Digital Historical Representations,’” Journal of Digital
Humanities, vol. 3, no. 2 (2014), http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/3-2/a-distinction-worth-exploring-archives-and-
digital-historical-representations/.
21
Blouin and Rosenberg, Processing the Past, p. 92.
22
Blouin and Rosenberg, Processing the Past, p. 160. The reference is to Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 17.
76 D. STONE

trawl through public buildings in postwar Germany – including hospitals, prisons and
local registry offices23 – to acquiring copies of documents seized by the Allies and used
for war crimes trials, from obtaining the records of national or charitable tracing
bureaus such as that run by the American Joint Distribution Committee in the early
1950s to making copies of documents that have been passed on by other archives, such
as USHMM. For example, in 1949,
many new sources of information [were] discovered, the most important being the Gestapo
and Kripo records in Würsburg [sic], a card Index containing 11 million names of workers
found in Kassel, Gestapo records found in the basement of the Polizei Präsidium in Karlsruhe
and the discovery of 3,215 urns containing the ashes of Concentration Camp Dachau inmates
kept in the cellars of the Perlacher Forst Cemetery, near Munich and never reported.24

To these materials were added, during this period, the registration cards of the IRO, which
provided valuable information on DPs. The ITS thus embodies precisely Blouin and
Rosenberg’s warning that historians need to be aware of the creation of the archive
before they use it. As one of the ITS’s own early reports stressed – and here the early
Cold War context provides the most obvious way in which the institution was circum-
scribed – proving that ‘it would be a mistake ever to think that there could be an
archive without a politics of the archive’25:
ITS is actively establishing a list of concentration camps, Kommandos and prisons, categor-
izing them according to the conditions of life and the regime of these places of imprison-
ment. … However, it must be remembered that this will represent a very considerable task,
which will require a long time to complete. On the other hand, ITS will not be able to guar-
antee that such a list is complete, as it is not possible to get information from the Russian
Zone and the Eastern States, or to make field enquiries in those countries.26

We should not be surprised to find, then, that during the Cold War, the ITS archive took
on several different guises, including producing catalogs of Nazi camps that were used less
for scholarly research than for substantiating indemnification claims; aiding the West
German government to achieve its goal of re-establishing sovereignty, especially in
respect of its foreign policy; and even, in some cases, providing material to the West
German authorities that helped to exculpate former Nazis. The politics of the archive in
the ITS’s case fully supports Rodgers’ claim that throughout its life there has been a ‘con-
tinual repurposing of its documents for political expediency.’27 The current reinterpreta-
tion of the documents as forming the basis of a humanitarian research institution is but the
latest incarnation of a body which has been through several metamorphoses.
Furthermore, given ITS’s dedication to documenting the grimmest period of modern
European history, awareness of the wide-ranging nature of its documentary holdings

23
See The International Tracing Service: Brief History of its History and Activities (March 1951), 6.1.1/82493199#1, ITS Digital
Archive, Wiener Library, London.
24
International Tracing Service, Annual Report of the Director (Bad Arolsen: ITS, 1949), p. 30, 6.1.1/82505905#1, ITS Digital
Archive, Wiener Library, London.
25
Thomas Osborne, “The Ordinariness of the Archive,” History of the Human Sciences, vol. 12, no. 2 (1999), p. 55.
26
International Tracing Service, Monthly Report (December 1948), p. 3. The publication referred to was International Tracing
Service, Catalogue of Camps and Prisons in Germany and German-Occupied Territories, Sept. 1st 1939–May 8th 1945
(Arolsen: International Tracing Service, 1949), a publication that was revised and enlarged several times over the next
years. See Martin Weinmann, (ed.), Das nationalsozialistische Lagersystem (CCP) (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins,
1990) for a reproduction of this work.
27
Rodgers, “From the ‘Archive of Horrors’ to the ‘Shop Window of Democracy,’” p. 14.
 DAPIM: STUDIES ON THE HOLOCAUST 77

needs to be complemented by a historicizing attitude toward the concepts that are

embedded within it. Here is what philosopher of history Eugen Zeleňák has to say, follow-
ing Paul A. Roth, about the existence of the predicates we use to structure historical
research:
[W]e categorize all the time, and our knowledge claims are full of predicates such as ‘occupa-
tion,’ ‘withdrawal,’ ‘skirmishes,’ ‘war,’ ‘nation,’ ‘minority,’ ‘immigration,’ and many others,
resulting from our classifications. But here comes the crucial question: How do we use
these predicates and what guides us in creating our taxonomies? … ‘Identifying events
proves no more fixed than current habits of classification.’ Thus, the traditional picture
with the key role played by the pre-existing organization of reality is replaced with a novel
dictum: ‘Training, feedback, and group reinforcement anchor words to the world.’28

He goes on to point out the implications on this insistence that the categories with which
we work are created and socially sanctioned, rather than ‘found’ in the world:
[W]e should reject the belief that past reality (via evidence) fixes our categories, which, on the
other hand, reflect the past; instead, we should become more sensitive to the fact that stabi-
lization comes from a different direction.29

As it happens, the categories apparently randomly selected by Zeleňák correspond well

with those to be found in the ITS; we might add to them ‘refugee,’ ‘stateless,’ ‘displaced
person,’ ‘claimed nationality,’ ‘repatriation,’ ‘resettlement,’ ‘victim,’ ‘collaborator’ and
others. Zeleňák’s claim means that rather than seeing the categories employed in ITS as
being fixed reflections of the past, we should see them as ‘community-sanctioned practices
of projection.’30 Why does this matter?
It matters for three reasons. First, because it shows us that the categories – which had
real effects on real persons – were not just given to those people because these groups sud-
denly came into being, but that the existence of those people shaped the categories, and
that these categories were born from political expediency, humanitarian concern, military
necessity, and logistical possibility. Second, it matters because the ITS used these categories
for its own purposes during the Cold War period. Therefore, resisting taking them as given
in reality allows us to reinterpret the ITS’s own institutional history as a work in progress,
an interpretive practice, in ways that allow us to understand how the ITS’s position
changed over time in response to the demands of Red Cross headquarters in Geneva
and European governments, most importantly the West German government in Bonn.
Third, it matters because understanding history in Zeleňák’s terms as constructed and
‘non-representational’ indicates that history-writing is not ‘constrained by epistemology
of correspondence.’ Rather, works of history should be ‘understood as simply presenting
interpretations, proposals, original theses, or arguments.’31 This does not mean that there
is no past, only that the traces of it that remain in the present are all that we have, and that
where those traces are written texts, the categories embedded in them should be

28
Eugen Zeleňák, “Two Versions of a Constructivist View of Historical Work,” History and Theory, vol. 54 (2015), p. 221, citing
Paul A. Roth, “The Pasts,” History and Theory, vol. 51, no. 3 (2012), pp. 327–328, 330.
29
Zeleňák, “Two Versions,” p. 222.
30
Ibid., citing Paul A. Roth, “Ways of Pastmaking,” History of the Human Sciences, vol. 15, no. 4 (2002), p. 135.
31
Zeleňák, “Two Versions,” p. 223. On the differences between Zeleňák’s ‘non-representationalism’ and constructivism,
which stresses that history represents the past albeit outside of a correspondence theory of truth, see Zeleňák, “Two Ver-
sions,” p. 223, fn. 42. In my opinion, Zeleňák does not give sufficient credit to the sophistication of thinkers such as Roth
and Ankersmit; essentially, though, the difference between them is not great.
78 D. STONE

understood not as fixed, natural entities, but as themselves the product of history. If we
take the categories in ITS for granted – ‘war,’ ‘immigration,’ and also ‘displaced person,’
‘refugee,’ ‘stateless’ and so on – then we write as if they were always there instead of under-
standing that they were in the process of being negotiated and defined into being by the
very process that codified and institutionalized them; that is, in Zeleňák’s words (following
Roth), ‘Our past habits and practices help us to stabilize the categories we use, which
means they also influence the outcomes of historians’ work.’32 We thus give the past a
sense of flux and contingency that resists the natural tendency to assume that the cate-
gories we find in the documents refer to established entities in the word when in fact
they refer to things that are coming into being.

Serendipity and digital research

The most notable characteristic of the ITS’s new mandate to become a research institution
is the digitization of its vast holdings. For over 10 years, teams of employees have been at
work in the basement of the ITS’s building on Arolsen’s Schloßstrasse turning paper into
digital signs, thanks to what media theorist Wolfgang Ernst calls a ‘technical
discontinuity’:
Whereas the traditional symbolic order of memory relied on fixed symbolical inscriptions
such as archives and libraries, writing or printing is currently being replaced by volatile elec-
tric charges as carriers of signals. Today the physically real is being registered by electrons
literally flashed into digital memories.33

This process is increasingly the subject of scholarly attention, with what Todd Presner
calls ‘the ethics of the algorithm’ and Noah Shenker the need to acquire ‘testimonial
literacy,’ becoming pressing matters for Holocaust historians, who are increasingly
working with digital sources.34
From the historian’s point of view, why should the digitizing process matter? The phy-
sical transformation that is taking place is apparently of secondary importance compared
with the fact that research is now being facilitated by the easy access to untold amounts of
information from anywhere in the world (or, in ITS’s case, from a number of specific sites
around the world other than Arolsen). In fact, the digitization process raises some funda-
mental questions about the nature of historical research. Indeed, Lara Putnam writes, ‘The
new topography of information has systematic blind spots. It opens shortcuts that enable
ignorance as well as knowledge. Digital search offers release from place-based research
practices that have been central to our discipline’s epistemology and ethics alike.’35
What are these blind spots? The first is the problem of ‘granularity’ or specific searches.
Robert Cole and Chris Hackett argue that ‘digital technology exists in a somewhat adver-
sarial relationship with traditional research culture’ and that this fact ‘is a matter of some
importance.’ This is because
32
Ibid., p. 224.
33
Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), p. 95.
34
Todd Presner, “The Ethics of the Algorithm: Close and Distant Listening to the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive,”
in Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner, (eds.), Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 175–202; Noah Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 2015), p. 2.
35
Lara Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast,” American His-
torical Review, vol. 121, no. 2 (2016), p. 379.
 DAPIM: STUDIES ON THE HOLOCAUST 79

The fundamental principles and assumptions that appear to animate engagement with
digital texts are fairly deeply at odds with traditional practice. The organizational principle
of ‘granularity’ that lies at the heart of digital information provides the most basic point of
conflict. This concept defines the digital environment both functionally and philosophically,
but it runs completely counter to the historians’ traditional understanding of sources as
organic and fundamentally indivisible entities.36

Historians always (should) enter archives with research questions derived from their prior
reading; they do not simply go, see what they can find and then ‘write it up.’ Nevertheless,
when searching through a paper archive, it is always the case that the historian finds unex-
pected things, things that change the nature of the research project.
Cole and Hackett’s point is that the specific search means that in allowing historians to
search precisely for what they think they want, they miss out on discovering the things
they do not (yet) know that they need. As they go on, ‘For historians, the act of engaging
documents that ultimately prove outside the narrow scope of their topic is not simply a
necessary evil but an indispensable component of the research process.’37 This is indeed
a problem familiar to any historian who has used digital archives. It is all too easy to
extract the ‘quotation’ one seeks through performing a simple keyword search and entirely
missing the information necessary to make sense of it: the rest of the document, some
understanding of its conditions of production, and other operations basic to source criti-
cism. Perhaps this is nowhere clearer than with the use of Holocaust testimonies; the use
value of digital archives such as the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive notwith-
standing, it is all too tempting to save time by performing a keyword search, thus contra-
vening every fundamental rule of oral history methodology with respect to listening to
those who give testimony.38 This is even before mentioning the problem of a historian’s
training, which has traditionally involved going to live in the place where the archive is
housed, immersing oneself in its language, society and culture. It is hard to believe that
accessing an archive from afar can provide the historian with the same ‘feel’ for the mate-
rial. This may be why some critics, most notably Tim Hitchcock, have severely admon-
ished historians for, as he sees it, their extreme coyness about using electronic sources,
preferring in their footnotes to suggest that they have consulted the original: ‘I have
yet,’ says Hitchcock, ‘to see a piece of academic history that is explicit about its reliance
on keyword search and electronic sources.’39 Certainly, Ludmilla Jordanova is right in
her rejoinder to Hitchcock when she asks, ‘What proportion of card-carrying historians
sincerely believes it is unnecessary to see and work from the original if this is feasible?’40
The problem is that, with respect to the ITS documents, it usually isn’t.

36
Robert Cole and Chris Hackett, “Search vs. Research: Full-Text Repositories, Granularity, and the Concept of ‘Source’ in the
Digital Environment,” in Cheryl Avery and Mona Holmlund, (eds.), Better Off Forgetting? Essays on Archives, Public Policy,
and Collective Memory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), p. 116.
37
Cole and Hackett, “Search vs. Research,” p. 120. See also Ansley T. Erickson, “Historical Research and the Problem of Cate-
gories,” in Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki, (eds.), Writing History in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michi-
gan Press, 2013), pp. 133–145; Mark Sandle, “Studying the Past in the Digital Age: From Tourist to Explorer,” in Toni
Weller, (ed.), History in the Digital Age (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 129–148.
38
See Noah Shenker, “Through the Lens of the Shoah: The Holocaust as Paradigm for Documenting Genocide Testimonies,”
History and Memory, vol. 28, no. 1 (2016), p. 146.
39
Tim Hitchcock, “Confronting the Digital or How Academic History Writing Lost the Plot,” Cultural and Social History, vol. 10,
no. 1 (2013): p. 18. In 2013, Hitchcock could not have read the Yearbook of the ITS, which only began publication in 2014,
but he would have been pleasantly surprised by the frankness with which the reliance on electronic sources is taken for
granted there, whether or not he liked the results.
40
Ludmilla Jordanova, “Historical Vision in a Digital Age,” Cultural and Social History, vol. 11, no. 3 (2014), p. 345.
80 D. STONE

Yet despite the necessity of working with digital sources in ITS, I would argue that ITS
represents something of an anomaly where criticisms of digital research are concerned. If
it is the case that, as Putnam says, ‘The disintermediation characteristic of digital informa-
tion flows shrugs away the nation- and empire-specific archives, indices, and historiogra-
phies that have been central gatekeepers within historians’ practice,’41 the ITS archive
reminds us that this is not always only a risky business. Certainly the possibility of
making silly errors as one steps outside a nation- or empire-specific area of expertise,
rooted deeply in paper-based archives, remains clear (a familiar problem for writers of
synthetic histories whether based on digital sources or not). At the same time, the
border-transcending, methodology-disrupting nature of the ITS archive in particular,
which becomes clear in the digital search, does actually represent the state of the paper
archive. Thus the digital search not only facilitates, but also elucidates a phenomenon
that might be all-too-easily overlooked if one is undertaking nation-specific research:
the fact that the ITS, and thus the massive crimes to which its archives testify, represent
not only a transnational crime, but a shared European, even worldwide, history.
Furthermore, I would also argue that the ITS digital archive to some extent resists
Putnam’s argument – with which I otherwise concur – concerning the loss of serendipity.
Although this might change in future as the ITS hones its digital environment (it is cur-
rently considering ways to improve its current digital platform, OUS), as currently config-
ured, a digital search in ITS, even with a keyword search, by no means guarantees that the
researcher will find what is being sought. With name searches, for example, one cannot
search for a single name without a range of names being brought up. This is a result of
the ITS’s alphabetical/phonetic system, which was introduced in 1948 in response to
the oft-encountered phenomenon that there were many varieties of spelling of names,
especially Eastern-European names (77 ways of spelling Kusnezow, for example42). By
replacing a simple alphabetical system with an alphabetical/phonetic one, a range of alter-
native spellings of names was produced. On the digital platform, this range is also repro-
duced, along with a continuous run of similar names. This both helps the researcher to
find the person being sought and brings up a large number of other individuals, whose
fascinating histories one was not expecting to find. The same is true of keyword searches,
which always bring up documents on topics that one was not expecting, leading the
researcher down new paths.
For the time being, then, ITS works to some extent like a paper archive, even in its
digital form. Nevertheless, one can assume that over time the problems identified by
Putnam are more likely to come up in ITS, too, as the digital platform is redesigned.
For the time being, however, not all the ITS materials have been digitized. In the non-digi-
tized material, much of which is also not cataloged (the ‘non-inventorized’ documents),
one finds material from across Europe that represents the different branches and different
themes covered by the ITS holdings in general.
In what follows I will present a few examples, with the aim of showing how this non-
inventorized material performs a theoretical and a methodological purpose. First, it con-
firms the argument above about the ways in which archives construct the past and thus
our present understanding of it; second, it shows how much of what is in ITS facilitates

Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable,” p. 380.

41
42
As noted in the HICOG Information Bulletin (n.d., 1951), 6.1.1/82493225#1, ITS Digital Archive, Wiener Library, London.
 DAPIM: STUDIES ON THE HOLOCAUST 81

an important shift in perspective with respect to the writing of the Holocaust, from an
institutional, top-down view to a bottom-up, social, and cultural history of the Holocaust
in which the experiences of the victims are given center stage. I will use documents relating
to the deportation of the Roma from Romania to Transnistria, and so-called Mischlinge in
postwar Czechoslovakia in order to illustrate the range of material that one can find in ITS,
to stress the pan-European nature of the Nazi crimes, and to show that there remains
much material in ITS pertaining to Eastern Europe that has not yet been researched by
historians. In due course, this material, too, will be digitized. Here I use the paper
archive not to indicate the difference that makes in ITS from the digital archive, but
quite the opposite: the arguments being set out here about the ways in which ITS material
supports a social history of the Holocaust apply just as well to a digital historiography of
the Holocaust. Even if, as one hopes, the paper archive remains accessible to researchers
who visit Bad Arolsen, the digital archive will continue to support fine-grained research
and large-scale analysis, as long as, paradoxically, the database does not become too
sophisticated. Approaching the scale of such an archive will be assisted by its being digi-
tized, but – with the exception of specific, circumscribed projects – being creative with the
holdings and thinking about a wider history of the Holocaust will require knowledge of
what, broadly speaking, is there as well as the ability to make serendipitous connections
not in opposition to, but precisely in order to enable, the profiling of datasets or metadata
analysis.43

Toward a social history of the Holocaust

Social scientists are familiar with the concept of ‘survivorship bias,’ that is, ‘the tendency to
extrapolate false conclusions from conspicuous data points, ignoring the volume of cases
made invisible by the very process you are trying to judge.’44 When working on the Holo-
caust, ‘survivorship bias’ takes on an added meaning, in that the points of evidence that
remain – that is, those who are able to talk as eyewitnesses of the crimes – are by definition
exceptional, for the majority did not survive. Thus, there is a contradiction between the
representation of the past offered by survivors and the non-representation of the past
(because impossible) that characterizes those whom Primo Levi called the ‘true witnesses,’
that is, those who were murdered or, in Levi’s terms, the ‘drowned.’ With respect to ITS,
‘survivorship bias’ applies to the documents themselves. Although unfathomably large,
they are not a complete record of Nazi crimes, and there is much that is not represented.
For example, although scholars have shown that, contrary to what many have claimed,
there is ample material for researching aspects of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, never-
theless, the majority of killings and the places in which they occurred in Eastern Europe –
especially those carried out by the Einsatzgruppen before the establishment of death camps
and concentration camps in occupied Eastern Europe – do not appear in the ITS records.45
Survivorship bias in this context means being aware of the records that survived and the
43
On the question of scale and appraisal, see Joshua Sternfeld, “Historical Understanding in the Quantum Age,” Journal of
Digital Humanities, vol. 3, no. 2 (2014), http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/3-2/historical-understanding-in-the-
quantum-age/.
44
This useful definition comes from a Guardian leader comment (September 8, 2016) on Prime Minister Theresa May’s plans
to allow the creation of new grammar schools in the United Kingdom.
45
For examples of ITS-based research in Eastern Europe, see Paul Shapiro, “Vapniarka: The Archive of the International
Tracing Service and the Holocaust in the East,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 27, no. 1 (2013), pp. 114–137;
82 D. STONE

people and places they represent, yet also bearing in mind that many of ITS’s records
pertain to survivors in the literal sense, that is, people who became DPs after the war.
Even positive search records that ended with confirmation that the searched-for person
was dead constitute a form of survivorship bias: there are, of course, hundreds of thou-
sands of people who have never been the subjects of a tracing enquiry, so that the three
million T/D files, vast though they are, are not wholly representative.
It is thus helpful to think of ITS, as with archives generally, as a sort of recycling center
or, less derogatively, as a donation center. The records that end up there are, more or less,
acquired randomly – although some, such as government department archives, are, of
course, selected more carefully – and the ways in which they are presented, made publicly
available, and used by historians depends very heavily on their current use value.
This is an idea that has been suggested by Torbjörn Gustafsson Chorell. If, as Chorell
argues, an archive can be understood as a ‘trash-sorting institution’ and historiography as
a variety of recycling, then the ways in which the past has recyclable value change over
time. ITS is an institution whose recycling value has risen of late, and if historians continue
to use its documents to reveal the full extent of Nazi and Nazi-allied criminality across
Europe, then its preservation value will continue to be contested.46 But what exactly is
being recycled here?
The material from the ITS’s holdings can be used to write a social and cultural history of
the Holocaust. By that I mean both a way of thinking about the Holocaust from below, that
is, from the perspective of the victims, and a history focused less on causality than on the
victims’ attempts to understand what was happening and to give meaning to it.47 This
approach leads to a more fine-grained history that is sensitive to locality and place, and
shows how the perpetrators’ understanding of the victims can be resisted through a
more careful reading of the victims’ own sense of belonging, rejection and displacement.
Ironically, in some cases, the only way of doing so is through the use of ‘official’ docu-
ments, that is to say, documents produced by the perpetrators; this is a common
paradox.48 But in other cases, especially in using documents produced soon after the
war, one can gain insights into the experience of the Holocaust that are not captured in
perpetrator documents, whose veneer of bureaucratic officialdom belies the vicious
attack on the victims and the brutal nature of their suffering. Furthermore, it is true
that postwar documents produced by military authorities, the UN, or charities working
with survivors also maintain, for the most part, an objective tone that disguises the despe-
rate situation of many of the survivors, but, unlike in perpetrator documents, this dilemma
is often commented on by the authors themselves.

Petre Matei, “Compensation Claims from Romania in the ITS Collections: Between the Victims and the State Politics,” Frei-
legungen: Jahrbuch des International Tracing Service, vol. 5 (2016), pp. 160–186.
46
Torbjörn Gustafsson Chorell, “Desire for the Past?,” Rethinking History, vol. 19, no. 4 (2015), p. 579.
47
See Andrea Löw, Doris L. Bergen and Anna Hájková, (eds.), Alltag im Holocaust: Jüdisches Leben im Großdeutschen Reich
1941–1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2013). On cultural history, see my article “Holocaust Historiography and Cultural
History,” Dapim: Studies on the Shoah, vol. 23 (2009), pp. 52–68 and the responses to it in the same issue by Dan Michman,
Carolyn J. Dean, Wendy Lower, Federico Finchelstein and Dominick LaCapra. See also Amos Goldberg, “The History of the
Jews in the Ghettos: A Cultural Perspective,” in Dan Stone, (ed.), The Holocaust and Historical Methodology (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2012), pp. 79–100; Amos Goldberg, “Rumor Culture among Warsaw Jews under Nazi Occupation: A
World of Catastrophe Reenchanted,” Jewish Social Studies, vol. 21, no. 3 (2016), pp. 91–125.
48
Harriet Bradley, a historian of trades unions, for example, comments that the ‘process of extracting narratives of struggle
from governmental documents highlights a great paradox of the archive.’ “The Seductions of the Archive: Voices Lost and
Found,” History of the Human Sciences, vol. 12, no. 2 (1999), p. 111.
 DAPIM: STUDIES ON THE HOLOCAUST 83

Apart from contributing to a social and cultural history of the Holocaust, the choice of
documents here is also a reflection of theoretical concerns about selection. By using non-
digitized material that is less readily accessible than the digitized documents – one has to
go physically to Bad Arolsen to see it – I want to try to mitigate the survivor bias that is an
inherent danger with digital research. The latter, especially where it tends to ‘big data’
analysis, tends to overlook individuals in favor of shared data points. Nevertheless, this
is also a valuable approach, and as Todd Presner argues, it is potentially an ethical
one, ‘precisely because it takes into account the fullness of the archive insofar as all
the indexed data related to the narrative of every survivor is part of the analysis.’49
Although a systematic, big data approach is possible with the paper search, it is
perhaps harder than it is with the digital search to ignore individual data points;
indeed, the risk here is that the accounts remain merely ‘anecdotal,’ lacking broader ana-
lysis. Most important, the paper sources give us insights into the struggles of individuals
and their families during and after the Holocaust in a way that brings up the issue of sur-
vivor bias more clearly: the surprising fact that one holds this document, and not another
one, in one’s hands is more readily apparent. With enough sources of a particular type, as
in the cases that follow, one can both access individuals’ stories and make sense of them
in the aggregate. Like all sources, the ones I use are not transparent windows into the past;
they are traces of ongoing negotiations of particular circumstances that give us merely
one fleeting sense of the broader environment out of which they have been ripped. But
they are what we have. The paper sources are not therefore ‘better’ than the digital
ones; rather, continuing to use them alongside digital sources is a reminder that the
debates over big data and the analytical gains to be had from the digital are yet to be
resolved and that current debates about the ethics of digital research remain applicable
in the analog sphere, too.
A good example of the need to use official documents to find out about victims can be
found with respect to the fate of Romanian Roma deported to Transnistria (the area of
Ukraine between the Dniestr and Bug rivers occupied by the Romanians). These are inter-
esting for several reasons. The first is that the prevailing image of the Holocaust in
Romania is of a chaotic, disorganized process in which the military and police deported
Jews and Roma to Transnistria and simply dumped them there with no regard for their
shelter or living conditions. Mass exterminations, such as at Bogdanovka in December
1941, were interspersed with appalling conditions for Jews in makeshift ghettos and
camps across Transnistria.50 This picture is not untrue, but it belies the extent to which
the Romanians kept records of what they were doing; indeed, such records exist on a
minute scale, with local police districts across Romania – especially those towns in
Moldova closest to Transnistria – keeping lists of individuals and families who were
deported or who attempted to return ‘illegally’ to Romania proper.

49
Presner, “The Ethics of the Algorithm,” p. 199. See Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano, (eds.), Geographies
of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014) for examples of the productive use of big data. See also
Sebastian Bondzio, Christoph Rass and Ismee Tames, “People on the Move: Revisiting Events and Narratives of the Eur-
opean Refugee Crisis (1930s–1950s),” Freilegungen: Jahrbuch des International Tracing Service, vol. 5 (2016), pp. 36–55.
50
See, for example, Jean Ancel, The History of the Holocaust in Romania (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press; and Jer-
usalem: Yad Vashem, 2011), Ch. 25 and 26. For an older, more emotional account, see Julius S. Fisher, Transnistria: The
Forgotten Cemetery (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1969), Ch. 4 and 5. And for an important recent discussion, see Vladimir
Solonari, “A Conspiracy to Murder: Explaining the Dynamics of Romanian ‘Policy’ towards Jews in Transnistria,” Journal of
Genocide Research, vol. 19, no. 1 (2017), pp. 1–21.
84 D. STONE

Most of these police lists offer little about the deportees other than stereotypes concern-
ing ‘Gypsies,’ often in the most patronizing official shorthand. For example, on a list of
Roma ‘evacuated’ from Buzau to Transnistria of 1942, there is mention of one Vilson
T. Ghiţă, known as Argintaru (‘silver worker’), with the following description: ‘On 12 Sep-
tember [he] was deported together with his parents and younger brother to Transnistria,
being a malignant family … Without a well-established trade, malignant, and hopeless
element’ (element rău şi incorigibil). In Barlad, one Serban Matei was identified as a
‘known wrongdoer’ (rău făcător), and in Piteşti, Ilie Tocană was described as ‘Without
a profession, without property, lacking the possibility of living honestly through work,
threat to public order’ (periculoşi ordinei publice). The Piteşti police liked this formulation
and similarly remarked about Ghică Ioan that he ‘possesses no trade and no means of
living honorably through work,’ just as they did for several others. In Târgu Magurele,
Constantin Becherliu was simply summed up as ‘Without stable occupation, author of
numerous frauds’ (excrocherii). Others were deported for stealing horses, for being
‘known offenders,’ or simply for being ‘criminal.’51 Similarly, in Timişoara in 1943, the
police drew up a list of ‘Gypsies who are a threat to public security.’ Heinrich Boţ, for
example, was described, along with his family, as ‘occupying themselves with nothing
except theft.’52
Perhaps more illuminating than these lists of deported Roma are lists gathered of those
Roma who tried or successfully managed to return from Transnistria. The Piteşti police,
for example, drew up such a list in 1943 and listed Gheorghe Pop, who was described as
follows: ‘By ethnic origin Romanian, possessing in that regard a certificate from the Piteşti
mayoralty, plumber, property-owner, fought with the 6th Artillery Regiment at Battles of
Karpova, Vigoda, Berezoni and Odessa. Has proof of demobilization. No criminal record.’
Despite these seemingly promising credentials, the police noted that he had returned to
Timişoara without authorization. More conclusively, the police in Oraviţa, in their list
of Roma who had returned ‘secretly,’ sounded a less forgiving note. Twenty-year-old
Petre Cârpaci had ‘no proof on his person of being freed from Transnistria’ and his ‘mis-
tress’ (concubină) Orja Lupu, who ‘accompanied him voluntarily to Transnistria,’ also
‘returned without papers.’53
Such lists reveal that the Romanian police had much more detailed information about
deportees than is commonly assumed. Even if that information cannot be relied upon, it
gives us more than names, but tells us that returning ‘illegally’ from Transnistria was quite
a widespread phenomenon and one that the police took seriously. The ‘primitiveness’ of
the Romanian Holocaust is evident in the fact that the police lists were often handwritten
as well as in the casual, stereotyped way in which the victims were described. But the extent
of the bureaucracy involved also confounds such assumptions.
Occasionally, however, we hear the voice of the Roma victims themselves, and in those
cases they challenge the stereotypes prominently on display in the police records. In
several letters from deported Roma, their authors reveal themselves to be educated and

51
All of these examples in: Inspectoratul Regional de Poliţie Galaţi, “Tabel nominal de ţigani mobilizabili de pe teritoriul
urban din raza acestui Inspectorat,” ITS Bad Arolsen, NInv 160/18. ITS NInv 160/15-25 contains copies of documents
from the State Archives in Bucharest, Fond Direcţia Generală Poliţiei.
52
“Tabel nominal despre ţiganii periculoşi la Siguranţa publică depe teritoriul urban regiunea Inspectoratului de Poliţie
Timişoara” (1943), ITS NInv 160/22.
53
“Tabel-Nominal despre ţiganii din Oraşul Oraviţa intorşi clandestine din Transnistria” (1943), ITS NInv 160/23.
 DAPIM: STUDIES ON THE HOLOCAUST 85

able to engage with the authorities in a way that would have been unexpected. For
example, a group of Romani men, Nicolae Carabulea, Vasile Amarioarei, Ileana Moisa
and Ion Vişan, all from Bacău, wrote to the authorities in Bucharest to protest their
families’ deportation to Transnistria and to request that they be permitted to go with
them. In elegant, formal Romanian, they also set out their credentials:
We are Gypsies, born and raised on the soil of our holy country, as were our forefathers
before us. We have done our duty to the fatherland as citizens and as soldiers. If the interests
of the country dictate that we now have to be colonizers in Transnistria, we willingly support
the High Government’s measures and are proud to be able to serve the fatherland in this case
too, because Transnistria forms part of the fatherland’s soil today and ‘ubi patria, ibi bene’; we
have only a single pride, although we are Gypsies we want to leave free, as free as we have
lived on the rich soil of the Old Kingdom.54

The files do not contain a response to the men, but an internal note comments simply that
both Carabulea and Vişan had police records for fraud and for theft; one can therefore
assume that their request did not get very far.
Such letters are even more striking when they come from Roma who were serving in the
army. One such, from one Dumitru Alexandru, serving in Odessa, explodes stereotypes of
Roma as illiterate and unreliable and at the same time indicates that in order to make his
case, he had to emphasize the extent to which he did not conform to these stereotypes,
thereby indicating that he had, in fact, absorbed them to some extent himself. Writing
to the governor of Transnistria to ask that his deported wife and two children be
allowed to return to Romania, Alexandru wrote,
I do not know the reason why my family was evacuated, because I am a peaceful man with a
regular trade, I am not a nomadic Gypsy and have been called up since 1939, performing my
duties to the country like every soldier; and I will continue to do so in the future.55

To his commandant, Alexandru was even bolder, writing ‘with tears in my eyes’ to make
his superiors understand that his wife and children were living in indescribable poverty
with almost nothing to eat and sleeping in the open.56
The relatives of soldiers serving also wrote to protest. Maria Balaban, a 60-year-old
woman from Băcău, wrote to the authorities to ask that her daughter be returned to
Băcău from Transnistria, where she had been deported with two of her brothers. The
brothers had been convicted, but the daughter, Anica, had not. Apart from her daughter
having no convictions, Balaban’s argument was: ‘I am a widow, I am ill, and I have another
son, Vasile Balaban, serving at the front, a soldier with 6th Pioneers.’ Should her request
not be possible, Balaban asked to be sent to Transnistria herself, where she could be with
her daughter:

54
Letter from Carabulea et al., n.d. (probably October 1942); internal note to Chief of Bacău Police Security Services, October
12, 1942, both in NInv 160/26, Mappe 3.
55
Letter from Dumitru Alexandru to Governor of Transnistria, Odessa, n.d. (1942?), ITS NInv 160/26, Mappe 3. In original: ‘Nu
ştiu pe ce motiv a fost evacuate familia mea, doearece sunt un om paşnic, de meserie sobar, nu sunt ţigan nomad şi sunt
concentrate din anul 1939, făcându-mi datoria faţă de ţară ca fiecare ostaş; şi voi fi şi mai departe tot astaş.’
56
Dumitru Alexandru to Commandant, 53 Battalion, 2nd Regiment, Iaşi, n.d. ITS NInv 160/26, Mappe 3. In original: ‘ …
trăind într-o mizerie de nedescris, neavând aproape nimic de mâncare şi dormind sub cerul liber.’ For several other exam-
ples, see Viorel Achim, “Atitudinea contemporanilor faţă de deportarea ţiganilor în Transnistria,” in Viorel Achim and Con-
stantin Iordachi, (eds.), Romănia şi Transnistria: Problema Holocaustului (Bucharest: Curtea Veche, 2004), pp. 201–233.
86 D. STONE

I still hope that a mother who has a son serving at the front should not face deportation …
and the sister of a fighter at the front should not be left abandoned in Transnistria where she
has been sent without doing any wrong … other than being of Gypsy origin … but she is obe-
dient and without fault.57

In these applications, one hears the victims of the Romanian deportation policy. Apart
from the fact that such pleas would have been more or less impossible in Nazi Germany,
they tell us – even without replies, which were probably never written, or official com-
ments – that some Roma victims were quite different from the way in which they were
portrayed by the Antonescu regime. In fact, the letter-writers understood how to appeal
to the authorities and walked a fine line between patriotic identification with and
protest against those authorities’ policies. They show, too, that historiographical con-
structs such as ‘deportation’ were not mechanistic processes that did not change once
they were implemented, but were constantly being negotiated and challenged. The view-
point from below, though it is stored in the records of the Romanian authorities, calls into
question the operation of the Holocaust in Romania.
A second example comes from postwar Czechoslovakia. In a field full of sad documents
– that is, Holocaust studies – these constitute some of the saddest, for they come from
people who survived only to face renewed persecution. Many so-called Jewish Mischlinge,
or ‘half-breeds,’ survived the war thanks to their non-Jewish spouses remaining married to
them despite the tremendous pressure such a decision put on the family; although there
were plans near the end of the war to deport ‘protected’ Mischlinge in mixed marriages,
the chaos of the period prevented them from being realized. For Jews, often German-
speaking, from the Sudetenland or Bohemia and Moravia, the sudden recreation of Cze-
choslovakia, now in a militant ethnically homogeneous mode and, with the approval of the
Allies, expelling ethnic Germans, presented an existential problem. Having been perse-
cuted under the Third Reich for being Jews, they were now being persecuted in the new
Czechoslovakia for being Germans, or at least for not speaking Czech as their mother
tongue. The ironic result of this new persecution was that these people wrote ‘urgent
SOS-calls’ to UNRRA, in German or English as they were able, to ask to be relocated
to, of all places, Germany.58
For example, Wilhelm Schlein, a 45-year-old furniture maker from Brno whose business
had been forcibly liquidated by the Nazis, found himself in dire straits after the war. His wife
had been deported to Theresienstadt, and he had been interned in a camp for Jewish Mis-
chlinge in Bystritz (Bystřice) near Beneschau (Benešov). Too weak to do manual labor, he
was now unable to support his wife and 14-year-old son, and could not ask the Jewish com-
munity for assistance since he was a Protestant (da ich nicht Glaubensjude, sondern evange-
lischer Konfession bin). Born in Bavaria, he was now asking UNRRA for help with relocation
back there, where he said he had relatives. ‘Is there not,’ he enquired, ‘a special rule in place
for antifascists and racial persecutees?’ The question was clearly pressing; Schlein finished
his letter in a way that simultaneously underscored and understated the reality of his exis-
tence: ‘I would be very grateful if we could be helped as soon as possible since, as I already
mentioned, I am completely destitute (mittellos).’

57
Letter from Maria Balaban, n.d. to unspecified Minister, ITS NInv 260/26.
“Urgent SOS-call” comes from a letter from the “Gruppe Sluknov” to UNRRA, October 23, 1946, ITS NInv 185/Teil II.
58
 DAPIM: STUDIES ON THE HOLOCAUST 87

Similarly, Oskar Schlesinger from Hrádek nad Nis wrote in broken English to ask to be
relocated to the American zone:
I have heard, that You are competent to give the permit for the emigration of Jews and Jewish
mongrels to the american occupied zone.

I am a half-Jew of german language and I should like to emigrate with my family from the
reason of the existence and I beg to request You, to send me the lists of queries or to inform
me, who me give the informations, concerning this emigration.

These were just two of many similar requests. Else Szejová explained that she and her
family had no possibility of existence (keine Existenzmöglichkeit) in Brno; Viktoria Schul-
ler-Götzburg ‘was told that all Germen [sic] have to leave this country’; Ota Vital, his anger
and frustration barely disguised, wrote that
competitors and applicants for shops and jobs are attacking us constantly on account of my
Jewish and my wife’s Austro-sudet origin. I want a safe future for my children and to save
them from such persecutions as we had to go through.59

Such documents speak first and foremost to the ongoing suffering of Holocaust victims;
there was no ‘happy ending’ in 1945. They suggest that it is possible to write a history of
Nazi persecution focused on the victims that does not neglect the perpetrators; indeed, a con-
tinued reliance on perpetrator documents provides some nuance to claims about the need for
a victim-centered historiography. Only an ‘integrated history’ will do. Ripped out of the
unfathomably large ITS collections, these few examples also indicate that the way in which
history is constructed is hugely dependent not just on the questions historians ask, but also
on the answers that archivists have prepared for them, knowingly or not. Both in digital
and paper form, working with the documents contained in ITS is like being confronted by
those who have long been silenced. It can be an overwhelming experience, not just because
of the sheer amount of information, but also because of the debt one feels to each and
every ‘document.’ Even taking ‘survivorship bias’ into account, ITS allows us to cover a
huge amount, geographically, chronologically and in terms of people involved. We see how
concepts that unfortunately continue to shape our world – ‘statelessness,’ ‘refugee,’ ‘displaced
person’ – do not just appear in the world, but are shaped by the people who are given and who
self-identify with them. Above all, we see how the enormity of the Holocaust and Nazi popu-
lation policies shaped, and continue to shape, the pattern of the postwar world more widely.
Wolfgang Ernst writes, ‘The rhythm of historical memory is directed and triggered by
the opening of formerly inaccessible archives and the waves of documents that are then
disseminated, feeding the endless production of new texts and books.’60 One does not
need to be a media theorist to make such a pedestrian observation; nevertheless, it is strik-
ingly true of the way in which ITS is beginning to influence the history of the Holocaust,
especially the recent focus on children, social history, DPs and other ‘aftermath’ issues.
The ‘endless production’ of Holocaust historiography will certainly be sustained for
some time by the opening of this remarkable institution to researchers. With ITS, we
can hear the voices of those screaming out to us from the endless piles of paper. In

59
These documents are all in ITS NInv 185/Teil I: letter from Wilhelm Schlein to UNRRA, November 23, 1946; letter from
Oskar Schlesinger to UNRRA, July 8, 1946; letter from Viktoria Schuller-Götzburg to UNRRA, July 24, 1946; letter from
Else Szejová to UNRRA, n.d. (1946); letter from Ota Vital to UNRRA, October 4, 1946.
60
Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, p. 202.
88 D. STONE

February 1948, the IRO’s Monthly Digest observed, ‘Just what the future of ITS is to be is
not yet known, but it is unlikely that its work will be completed by the time the IRO’s
mandate is finished in June, 1950.’61 Indeed it was not. In some ways, one can see that
the ITS’s work is only just beginning.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to colleagues at the International Tracing Service, especially Christian Groh and
Henning Borggräfe, for helping me access the non-inventorized material in Bad Arolsen. Thanks
also to Christine Schmidt and Mary Vrabecz at the Wiener Library, London, for their ongoing
help with negotiating the digital version of ITS, to Simone Gigliotti, Michelle Gordon and Becky
Jinks for reading the first draft of this article, and to the two anonymous reviewers for their insight-
ful comments and helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust [grant number MRF-2015-052].

Notes on contributor
Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Centre at Royal
Holloway, University of London. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including: His-
tories of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2010); Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–1939:
Before War and Holocaust (2nd ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Goodbye to All That? The Story of
Europe since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2014); The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the
Holocaust and its Aftermath (Yale University Press, 2015) and Concentration Camps: A Short
History (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently the recipient of a Leverhulme Trust
Major Research Fellowship, working on a project entitled Tracing the Holocaust: The International
Tracing Service and European History.

“IRO’s Bureau of Missing Persons,” International Refugee Organization Monthly Digest, vol. 5 (February 1948), p. 2.
61