Archives Of The Holocaust

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The first ever documentation of the formidable holdings of the largest archive on the Holocaust The Arolsen Holocaust Archive chronicles the history of the Nazi repository of voluminous prisoner records from World War II, capturing in excruciating exactitude the Nazi campaign to murder millions and eradicate European Jewry. Located in Bad Arolsen, Germany, and under the auspices of the International Red Cross, the International Tracing Service (ITS) was renamed the Arolsen Archives - International Center on Nazi Prosecution in 2019 and is one of the largest Holocaust archives in the world. The repository holds 17.5 million name cards, over 50 million documents and more than 16 miles of records and artifacts--all of which were out of reach for both survivors and scholars from its founding in 1943 until the ITS's opening to the public in 2007. New York-based photographer Richard Ehrlich (born 1938) is the first to record the interiors of the archives through photography, and thus to preserve the unspeakable atrocities it contains; his project forms part of permanent collections including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Notable images include documentation of Schindler's Listand Anne Frank's transport papers to Bergen-Belsen, as well as minute details of prisoner exploitation.

Annotation This important and original book is the first sustained analysis of the unique ways in which oral testimony of survivors contributes to our understanding of the Holocaust. Langer argues that it is necessary to deromanticize the survival experience and that to burden it with accolades about the "indomitable human spirit" is to slight its painful complexity and ambivalence.

After World War II, tracing and documenting Nazi victims emerged against the background of millions of missing persons and early compensation proceedings. This was a process in which the Allies, international aid organizations, and survivors themselves took part. New archives, documentation centers and tracing bureaus were founded amid the increasing Cold War divide. They gathered documents on Nazi persecution and structured them in specialized collections to provide information on individual fates and their grave repercussions: the loss of relatives, the search for a new home, physical or mental injuries, existential problems, social support and recognition, but also continued exclusion or discrimination. By doing so, institutions involved in this work were inevitably confronted with contentious issues—such as varying political mandates, neutrality vs. solidarity with those formerly persecuted, data protection vs. public interest, and many more. Over time, tracing bureaus and archives changed methods and policies and even expanded their activities, using historical documents for both research and public remembrance. This is the first publication to explore this multifaceted history of tracing and documenting past and present.