Probe into ‘culture of fear’ at largest archive of Nazi persecution

“This investigation is ongoing. We’ll then be informed when it’s finished. And then the International Committee has to make a decision.” Azoulay and Baumheier declined to comment.

The ITS was set up by the Allies at the end of the war to trace missing people. It quickly acquired vast amounts of documentation from the Nazi concentration camps, prisons and other sites of incarceration.

With the addition of sources from the immediate postwar period, including documents relating to the displaced persons camps and emigration, as well as files relating to the tracing process itself, the ITS archive holds more than 30 million documents, containing the names of more than 17.5million individuals.

With more than 25km of shelving, the archive is a breathtaking monument in its own right.

From 1955 to 2012, the tracing service was administered by the International Committee of the Red Cross. It remains a tracing service as well as an archive open to scholars.

The claims about Azoulay’s and Baumheier’s leadership have been widely reported in the German press, from local newspapers such as the Hessenschau, Jewish outlets such as the Jüdische Allgemeine, and major national publications such as Der Spiegel and the German Editorial Network (the equivalent of the Press Association). But, somewhat curiously, they have found no echo in the English-speaking media.

Why should readers of the JC care about this story? The British government co-funded the ITS’s work from its beginning, and the archive’s history tells a story of a Britain that from 1944 onwards invested money and resources in war-ravaged Europe in order to carry out, however imperfectly, an act of ethical repair against the Nazis’ crimes.

After the first few postwar years, British civil servants complained about having to continue funding ITS, and the IC neglected to take much notice of it, as this newspaper reported at challenging moments, such as when the administration of the archives was being debated in 1955.

This is not just the world’s largest archive pertaining to the Nazi crimes: it is an archive whose history remains bound up with the UK. A digital copy of the archive is available at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London.

The irony is not just that an institution that is devoted to illuminating the evils of the past should be beset by allegations of bad working practices.

One of the reasons for opening up the archive in the first place was that under one of the Red Cross directors, Charles-Claude Biedermann, there were allegations that the ITS became a secretive and oppressive organisation.

credit ITS Arolsen

The home of the archive (Photo: ITS Arolsen)

Apart from the personal tragedies of devoted employees who have left their jobs, the largest irony concerns the future of the Arolsen Archives. Under Azoulay’s leadership, the institution has made it clear that it sees itself as a “memory institution”, promoting campaigns on social media and in the public sphere, such as its #everynamecounts programme.

Yet these programmes have been at the expense of maintaining the archive and promoting scholarship. All but one of the historians working in the research department have left. Worse yet, the research department no longer exists.

Without research, and certainly without caring for the archive that facilitates it, there can be no commemorative campaigns, however “relevant” to contemporary society the directorship wants to be.

Since 1955, the IC has tended to take the line of least resistance and not engaged seriously with problems at the ITS.

One hopes that, in today’s circumstances, with widespread Holocaust awareness being challenged in Germany by the AfD and elsewhere by similar far-right forces, it will act where necessary to defend the integrity and future of one of the world’s most significant archives.

Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London.

His book on the International Tracing Service, ‘Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust’, has just been published by Oxford University Press