Sunday, November 02, 2008
Hitler Led Kristallnacht
NEWS
Hitler Led Kristallnacht
by Yated Ne'eman Staff
http://chareidi.shemayisrael.com/akrstlnchtnch69.htm
1 Cheshvan 5769 - October 31, 2008
A German historian researching the diaries of Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, has revealed that Hitler himself led the Kristallnacht pogrom in Munich on November 9, 1938 as head of a Nazi group that razed Ohel Yaakov, the central synagogue of Munich, capital of Bavaria. Angela Hermann, a researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, managed to decode a mysterious passage that has stumped scholars ever since this section of Goebbels diaries was retrieved from Moscow in 1992.
"We have real evidence now that Hitler pulled the strings, that he personally directed Kristallnacht," she said.
In his diary entry for November 9, the Nazi propaganda minister recounts a rally at the Munich Town Hall in which Hitler told him the police should let people vent their anger over the vom Rath assassination. "Hitler's Stosstrupp [Storm Troopers company] goes out immediately to clean up Munich...and a synagogue is smashed," he wrote.
This had historians puzzled, as there was no force known as ''Hitler's Stosstrupp'' in 1938, but Dr. Hermann found letters and documents showing that the term referred to the veterans of Hitler's failed attempt to seize power in 1923, known as the Beer Hall Putsch. She uncovered invitations to Hitler's former comrades to attend a demonstration held on November 9th — the same 39 people who later razed the beis knesses under his command.
In a parallel development Israeli reporter and researcher Yaron Svoray recently found a massive dump north of Berlin that he claims was used as a dumpsite for Jewish property stolen and destroyed by the Nazis. Citing reliable sources he says most of the findings at the site arrived there following the looting of botei knesses and Jewish stores during Kristallnacht. Among the items found were mezuzas, wine bottles stamped with a Star of David and parts of windows and engraved chairs from a shul. Now the Holocaust Remembrance Museum at Kibbutz Lochamei HaGeta'ot is planning to send a youth delegation to the site to continue the digging.
Less than two weeks away is the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, which marked a new low point in the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany. The massive countrywide pogrom broke out after a Jewish teenager named Herschel Grynszpan walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot dead diplomat Ernst vom Rath. By November 10th at least 92 Jews had been killed, over 200 botei knesses had been desecrated and thousands of Jewish businesses across the country had been looted."
Hitler Led Kristallnacht
by Yated Ne'eman Staff
http://chareidi.shemayisrael.com/akrstlnchtnch69.htm
1 Cheshvan 5769 - October 31, 2008
A German historian researching the diaries of Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, has revealed that Hitler himself led the Kristallnacht pogrom in Munich on November 9, 1938 as head of a Nazi group that razed Ohel Yaakov, the central synagogue of Munich, capital of Bavaria. Angela Hermann, a researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, managed to decode a mysterious passage that has stumped scholars ever since this section of Goebbels diaries was retrieved from Moscow in 1992.
"We have real evidence now that Hitler pulled the strings, that he personally directed Kristallnacht," she said.
In his diary entry for November 9, the Nazi propaganda minister recounts a rally at the Munich Town Hall in which Hitler told him the police should let people vent their anger over the vom Rath assassination. "Hitler's Stosstrupp [Storm Troopers company] goes out immediately to clean up Munich...and a synagogue is smashed," he wrote.
This had historians puzzled, as there was no force known as ''Hitler's Stosstrupp'' in 1938, but Dr. Hermann found letters and documents showing that the term referred to the veterans of Hitler's failed attempt to seize power in 1923, known as the Beer Hall Putsch. She uncovered invitations to Hitler's former comrades to attend a demonstration held on November 9th — the same 39 people who later razed the beis knesses under his command.
In a parallel development Israeli reporter and researcher Yaron Svoray recently found a massive dump north of Berlin that he claims was used as a dumpsite for Jewish property stolen and destroyed by the Nazis. Citing reliable sources he says most of the findings at the site arrived there following the looting of botei knesses and Jewish stores during Kristallnacht. Among the items found were mezuzas, wine bottles stamped with a Star of David and parts of windows and engraved chairs from a shul. Now the Holocaust Remembrance Museum at Kibbutz Lochamei HaGeta'ot is planning to send a youth delegation to the site to continue the digging.
Less than two weeks away is the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, which marked a new low point in the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany. The massive countrywide pogrom broke out after a Jewish teenager named Herschel Grynszpan walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot dead diplomat Ernst vom Rath. By November 10th at least 92 Jews had been killed, over 200 botei knesses had been desecrated and thousands of Jewish businesses across the country had been looted."
Labels: Adolf Hitler, German Jews, Germany, Hitler, Holocaust, Kristallnacht, Nazi Germany, Nazis, Nazism, The Holocaust
Friday, January 18, 2008
Nazi Archives open
Museum Provides Detail From Nazi Archive
WASHINGTON, Fri Jan 18, 12:38 AM
Associated Press
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is offering to help survivors and their families navigate a vast Nazi archive that promises to document their persecution and provide clues to the fate of loved ones.
After months of work on more than 100 million digital images from the International Tracing Service archive in Bad Arolsen, Germany, the museum announced that it would begin answering requests from survivors and their families.
"This moment is a wonderful victory for survivors, although long overdue," museum director Sara J. Bloomfield said Thursday in a statement. "But the significance of ITS extends far beyond the survivor generation. With an increase in Holocaust denial and minimization, the evidence in this massive archive will serve as an authentic witness to the scope of the crimes of the Holocaust for many generations to come."
In August, the ITS began transferring the documents to the Washington museum and two others — Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem's outskirts, and the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw, Poland. The International Committee of the Red Cross administers the ITS archive.
The Washington museum will be the first of the three museums to begin answering large numbers of requests that researchers hope will help survivors and their families get long-sought answers to bitter questions. They believe even small details could prove invaluable to aging survivors.
"The reason that we got into this in the first place is that we heard from so many survivors and families that it was important for them psychologically," said Paul Shapiro, director of the museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. "Having a copy of a real document in your hand, perhaps seeing the signature of someone who you lost — that may be the only connection to a moment when that person was alive that you have got."
The museum has been accepting requests for information from survivors and their families since last month. It also has provided information to a small number of people as part of its efforts to learn how to search the immense archive and to train its researchers. Now it will begin responding on a larger scale.
Survivors and their families can make requests online on the museum's Web site. The museum also will provide request forms by mail or through a toll-free number, 866-912-4385.
The museum is warning that while the documents — transportation lists, Gestapo orders, camp registers, slave labor booklets, death books — refer to about 17.5 million people, they are not a comprehensive documentation of the fates of the millions of victims and survivors.
Most of the documents in the archive are written by hand, sometimes in old German script. They also contain variations in the spelling of names, many of which are recorded phonetically. That makes it impossible, for now, to convert large numbers of files to a digitally searchable form.
Shapiro says survivors who hope the files will contain important information on lost life insurance policies also may be frustrated, as researchers have not found evidence that the files contain that information.
Those hopes have been reflected in legal action by survivors. In a multimillion-dollar settlement between victims and the Italian insurance company Assicurazioni Generali, a federal judge ruled last year that a deadline for victims to file claims, now expired, could be extended until August if the Arolsen files turned up relevant information.
Despite the archive's limitations, historians believe the files' data on the 17.5 million individuals will add texture to the narrative of misery in the camps, where millions of people were worked to death or were simply exterminated with industrial efficiency. Six million Jews died in the Holocaust, one of every three Jews on Earth at the time.
Allied forces began collecting the documents even before the end of World War II and eventually entrusted them to the Red Cross. The archive has been governed since 1955 by a commission of 11 nations that ratified an accord in November that unsealed the archive.
The ITS has completed digitizing some 50 million index cards from shelves that would stretch 16 miles and fill a half-dozen buildings in Bad Arolsen. The remainder of the collection, relating to slave labor and displaced persons camps, will be transferred to the museums in installments between 2008 and 2010.
On the Net:
International Tracing Service: http://www.its-arolsen.org/
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org/
Yad Vashem: http://www.yadvashem.org/
Institute of National Remembrance: http://www.ipn.gov.pl/wai/en/10/5/
WASHINGTON, Fri Jan 18, 12:38 AM
Associated Press
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is offering to help survivors and their families navigate a vast Nazi archive that promises to document their persecution and provide clues to the fate of loved ones.
After months of work on more than 100 million digital images from the International Tracing Service archive in Bad Arolsen, Germany, the museum announced that it would begin answering requests from survivors and their families.
"This moment is a wonderful victory for survivors, although long overdue," museum director Sara J. Bloomfield said Thursday in a statement. "But the significance of ITS extends far beyond the survivor generation. With an increase in Holocaust denial and minimization, the evidence in this massive archive will serve as an authentic witness to the scope of the crimes of the Holocaust for many generations to come."
In August, the ITS began transferring the documents to the Washington museum and two others — Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem's outskirts, and the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw, Poland. The International Committee of the Red Cross administers the ITS archive.
The Washington museum will be the first of the three museums to begin answering large numbers of requests that researchers hope will help survivors and their families get long-sought answers to bitter questions. They believe even small details could prove invaluable to aging survivors.
"The reason that we got into this in the first place is that we heard from so many survivors and families that it was important for them psychologically," said Paul Shapiro, director of the museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. "Having a copy of a real document in your hand, perhaps seeing the signature of someone who you lost — that may be the only connection to a moment when that person was alive that you have got."
The museum has been accepting requests for information from survivors and their families since last month. It also has provided information to a small number of people as part of its efforts to learn how to search the immense archive and to train its researchers. Now it will begin responding on a larger scale.
Survivors and their families can make requests online on the museum's Web site. The museum also will provide request forms by mail or through a toll-free number, 866-912-4385.
The museum is warning that while the documents — transportation lists, Gestapo orders, camp registers, slave labor booklets, death books — refer to about 17.5 million people, they are not a comprehensive documentation of the fates of the millions of victims and survivors.
Most of the documents in the archive are written by hand, sometimes in old German script. They also contain variations in the spelling of names, many of which are recorded phonetically. That makes it impossible, for now, to convert large numbers of files to a digitally searchable form.
Shapiro says survivors who hope the files will contain important information on lost life insurance policies also may be frustrated, as researchers have not found evidence that the files contain that information.
Those hopes have been reflected in legal action by survivors. In a multimillion-dollar settlement between victims and the Italian insurance company Assicurazioni Generali, a federal judge ruled last year that a deadline for victims to file claims, now expired, could be extended until August if the Arolsen files turned up relevant information.
Despite the archive's limitations, historians believe the files' data on the 17.5 million individuals will add texture to the narrative of misery in the camps, where millions of people were worked to death or were simply exterminated with industrial efficiency. Six million Jews died in the Holocaust, one of every three Jews on Earth at the time.
Allied forces began collecting the documents even before the end of World War II and eventually entrusted them to the Red Cross. The archive has been governed since 1955 by a commission of 11 nations that ratified an accord in November that unsealed the archive.
The ITS has completed digitizing some 50 million index cards from shelves that would stretch 16 miles and fill a half-dozen buildings in Bad Arolsen. The remainder of the collection, relating to slave labor and displaced persons camps, will be transferred to the museums in installments between 2008 and 2010.
On the Net:
International Tracing Service: http://www.its-arolsen.org/
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org/
Yad Vashem: http://www.yadvashem.org/
Institute of National Remembrance: http://www.ipn.gov.pl/wai/en/10/5/
Labels: Holocaust, Holocaust Museum, Nazi Archives, Nazi Germany
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Nazi Archives Reveal Real Horrors
German archives' opening helps Israeli man track his father's death in Holocaust
By Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz Correspondent
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/945047.html
Wed., January 16, 2008 Shvat 9, 5768
The last time 74-year-old Moshe Bar-Yoda saw his father, Avraham Kastner was about to be sent to a Nazi labor camp in Slovakia along with other residents of his Czech village.
The Yad Vashem Holocaust museum archives have a record of Kastner being sent to the camp on March 27, 1942, but there the documentary trail ended.
Although a witness testified before the rabbinate in 1948 that Kastner had been killed in a concentration camp during the Holocaust, Bar-Yoda, a journalist and Jewish Agency emissary, did not know any of the details and had no record of his father's death - until now.
Two weeks ago, Bar-Yoda became the first Israeli to receive information about the fate of family members via Yad Vashem since Germany's International Tracing Service at Bad Arolsen opened its World War II archives to the public at the end of November.
The tracing service says it serves victims of Nazi persecutions and their families by documenting their fate through the archives it manages.
The archives include more than 50 million references that contain information about more than 17 million people.
Although relatives of Nazi victims had previously been allowed to examine the archives, the records are now open to researchers around the world and have been digitally transferred to the Yad Vashem archives, making it easier for family members to conduct more precise searches and find out exactly what happened to their loved ones.
After searching the International Tracing Service records, Bar-Yoda discovered that his father's name appears on the list of the dead whose bodies were incinerated at the Majdanek death camp in Poland on September 7, 1942, six months after the two last saw each other.
Now, Bar-Yoda said, he can finally commemorate his father's passing on his yahrtzeit the day of his death instead of on the day designated for those who do not know the day of their loved one's death.
"Ater having said kaddish [the Jewish mourner's prayer] for him for 60 years on the general kaddish day on the fast of Asara B'Tevet, now I have a specific yahrtzeit," said Bar-Yoda. "And while it doesn't comfort me or make me happy, there is a kind of satisfaction here, that I can move forward."
Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev said Bar-Yoda's tale shows how the newly expanded collection of records can help the families of Holocaust victims.
"This story demonstrates how the tens of millions of documents collected by the Yad Vashem archives, in conjunction with the millions of new documents that have recently arrived and will arrive from the International Tracing Service archive in Germany over the next two years, will be able to help individuals fill in the picture about the fate of their loved ones in the Holocaust."
Yad Vashem had previously received many documents from the International Tracing Service, but will be bolstering its collection over the next two years. Bar-Yoda had looked through the Yad Vashem archives, which include microfilm of some 20 million documents received from the tracing service at the end of the 1950s. However, the Majdanek document did not reach the Bad Arolsen archives until the mid-1960s.
By Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz Correspondent
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/945047.html
Wed., January 16, 2008 Shvat 9, 5768
The last time 74-year-old Moshe Bar-Yoda saw his father, Avraham Kastner was about to be sent to a Nazi labor camp in Slovakia along with other residents of his Czech village.
The Yad Vashem Holocaust museum archives have a record of Kastner being sent to the camp on March 27, 1942, but there the documentary trail ended.
Although a witness testified before the rabbinate in 1948 that Kastner had been killed in a concentration camp during the Holocaust, Bar-Yoda, a journalist and Jewish Agency emissary, did not know any of the details and had no record of his father's death - until now.
Two weeks ago, Bar-Yoda became the first Israeli to receive information about the fate of family members via Yad Vashem since Germany's International Tracing Service at Bad Arolsen opened its World War II archives to the public at the end of November.
The tracing service says it serves victims of Nazi persecutions and their families by documenting their fate through the archives it manages.
The archives include more than 50 million references that contain information about more than 17 million people.
Although relatives of Nazi victims had previously been allowed to examine the archives, the records are now open to researchers around the world and have been digitally transferred to the Yad Vashem archives, making it easier for family members to conduct more precise searches and find out exactly what happened to their loved ones.
After searching the International Tracing Service records, Bar-Yoda discovered that his father's name appears on the list of the dead whose bodies were incinerated at the Majdanek death camp in Poland on September 7, 1942, six months after the two last saw each other.
Now, Bar-Yoda said, he can finally commemorate his father's passing on his yahrtzeit the day of his death instead of on the day designated for those who do not know the day of their loved one's death.
"Ater having said kaddish [the Jewish mourner's prayer] for him for 60 years on the general kaddish day on the fast of Asara B'Tevet, now I have a specific yahrtzeit," said Bar-Yoda. "And while it doesn't comfort me or make me happy, there is a kind of satisfaction here, that I can move forward."
Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev said Bar-Yoda's tale shows how the newly expanded collection of records can help the families of Holocaust victims.
"This story demonstrates how the tens of millions of documents collected by the Yad Vashem archives, in conjunction with the millions of new documents that have recently arrived and will arrive from the International Tracing Service archive in Germany over the next two years, will be able to help individuals fill in the picture about the fate of their loved ones in the Holocaust."
Yad Vashem had previously received many documents from the International Tracing Service, but will be bolstering its collection over the next two years. Bar-Yoda had looked through the Yad Vashem archives, which include microfilm of some 20 million documents received from the tracing service at the end of the 1950s. However, the Majdanek document did not reach the Bad Arolsen archives until the mid-1960s.
Labels: Concentration camps, death camps, extermination camps, Holocaust survivors, Nazi Germany, The Holocaust
Monday, October 29, 2007
Death records of Jews executed by Nazis
Systematic mass murder of Jews detailed in huge Nazi archive
By Assaf Uni,
Haaretz Correspondent
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/918079.html
Mon., October 29, 2007 Cheshvan 17, 5768
BAD AROLSEN, Germany - Twenty days of systematic murder of prisoners in the Majdanek concentration camp are detailed in a thick office binder in the huge archive of Nazi documents in this central German city.
The binder contains hundreds of pages written on both sides. Each one has a table containing the following information: first name, last name, date of birth, address, date of death - all written out in a careful longhand. The blue ink has faded over the years, but the Jewish names jump out. Lists upon lists of towns and cities throughout Poland, Czechoslovakia and Germany. In the last column, the date of death, there is not much variety: one of 20 days in September, 1942. The title on the binder reads: Lublin-Majdanek, crematorium list 08.09-1942-28.09.1942.
The lists were apparently brought out of the Majdanek concentration camp after it was liberated by the Russians. On the shelves around this one binder, on the first floor of the International Tracing Service (ITS) complex, are thousands more binders - the original records of the dead at the Buchenwald and Matthausen concentration camps, lists made by the Gestapo of deportees from Holland, who were captured at its headquarters after Germany surrendered, etc. All the documents are cataloged according to the names of victims and survivors, reflecting the efficiency of the Nazi bureaucracy.
This is the largest archive of Nazi documents in the world - more than 33 million pages of records, stored in six buildings in Bad Arolsen, a Baroque town north of Frankfurt. The archive was established after World War II by the Allies, taking advantage of the town's location between Germany's four areas of occupation, and the fact that it had suffered practically no damage from bombardment. It is funded by the German government and operated by the Red Cross. Searching among the 17.5 million names recorded there, staffers assist people seeking information on the fate of their families or submitting demands for reparations from the German authorities.
For more than 60 years, the archive was open only to survivors and their families, international Holocaust organizations, scholars and journalists. Last week Greece, one of the 11 countries who are members of the archive's council, became the last to approve an agreement opening it to the public.
At a time when neo-Nazis are burning copies of "The Diary of Anne Frank," there is significance to one line concealed here among the names of Jews brought to Holland's Westenbork camp on the way to Auschwitz: "Frank, Annelise."
The archive contains four collections. The 'imprisonment list' is the most interesting in terms of the information that it provides. It includes documents from concentration camps, ghettos and prison camps dating from 1933 to 1945. It was copied in its entirety in the 1950s by the Yad Vashem Holcaust Memorial and transfered to Jerusalem, but at Bad Arolsen it's more accessible. It has also been copied digitally in recent years and transfered to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. and to Yad Vashem, and may soon be accessible on the Internet.
The second collection contains 'documents from the period of the war,' with information about forced laborers in Germany beginning in 1939, including places of work and illness reports. The third collection, which is the largest, contains 'documents after the war,' with lists of all refugees and displaced persons who passed through Germany and all of Europe after the war. The fourth collection is information concerning lost children.
Inquiries can be submitted by telephone, mail or email. For example, an inquiry about a Jewish survivor of Buchenwald who immigrated to Israel could be answered by a list of deportees from the ghetto, information detailing a certain period in the camp or describing its liberation by the Americans, or lists from transit camps of people immigrating to Israel.
The ITS staff will conduct a search according to name, date and place of birth, and send the results to the inquirer, or invite him/her to the archive to look at the original documents. The ITS promises a response within eight weeks. Last year, it received 800 inquiries from Israel.
Last weekend, in one part of the archive, a book of the victims of the Matthausen concentration camp in Austria lay open on a table, where a staffer was working on an inquiry. The book reveals that on April 20, 1942, in honor of Hitler's 53rd birthday, 53 prisoners were executed. Their names were listed with times of death about two minutes apart between 11:20 and 12:54. Cause of death: 'Shot by order of the Reich defense ministry,' with space-saving 'ditto' markings beneath the first entry.
One of the names that came up randomly in the Auschwitz death book was M. Schlusser, a Jewish locksmith, who died on February 11, 1943. His parents' names and his place of birth were also noted, along with his age, 22, and cause of death: "exhaustion."
"There are apparently no new historical revelations about the Holocaust hiding here," Reto Meister, the ITS director says. "But there is an abundance of private historical information waiting for families of victims and survivors. We want to be a center to which families can come to get answers to the questions that trouble them."
And what does Meister say about the huge collection itself? "There is no doubt that human society has a strong need for order, which expresses itself in the recording of history. What for me is inconceivable is how this need was utilized so horrifically to destroy human beings. The obsessive recording of the Nazis was a kind of terrible way to pretend that something completely ordinary was going on."
The main feeling one gets from leafing through the well-ordered documents with their careful writing is how those 20 days at Majdanek, or those three years of the Final Solution, were truly ordinary for those who inscribed these lists.
By Assaf Uni,
Haaretz Correspondent
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/918079.html
Mon., October 29, 2007 Cheshvan 17, 5768
BAD AROLSEN, Germany - Twenty days of systematic murder of prisoners in the Majdanek concentration camp are detailed in a thick office binder in the huge archive of Nazi documents in this central German city.
The binder contains hundreds of pages written on both sides. Each one has a table containing the following information: first name, last name, date of birth, address, date of death - all written out in a careful longhand. The blue ink has faded over the years, but the Jewish names jump out. Lists upon lists of towns and cities throughout Poland, Czechoslovakia and Germany. In the last column, the date of death, there is not much variety: one of 20 days in September, 1942. The title on the binder reads: Lublin-Majdanek, crematorium list 08.09-1942-28.09.1942.
The lists were apparently brought out of the Majdanek concentration camp after it was liberated by the Russians. On the shelves around this one binder, on the first floor of the International Tracing Service (ITS) complex, are thousands more binders - the original records of the dead at the Buchenwald and Matthausen concentration camps, lists made by the Gestapo of deportees from Holland, who were captured at its headquarters after Germany surrendered, etc. All the documents are cataloged according to the names of victims and survivors, reflecting the efficiency of the Nazi bureaucracy.
This is the largest archive of Nazi documents in the world - more than 33 million pages of records, stored in six buildings in Bad Arolsen, a Baroque town north of Frankfurt. The archive was established after World War II by the Allies, taking advantage of the town's location between Germany's four areas of occupation, and the fact that it had suffered practically no damage from bombardment. It is funded by the German government and operated by the Red Cross. Searching among the 17.5 million names recorded there, staffers assist people seeking information on the fate of their families or submitting demands for reparations from the German authorities.
For more than 60 years, the archive was open only to survivors and their families, international Holocaust organizations, scholars and journalists. Last week Greece, one of the 11 countries who are members of the archive's council, became the last to approve an agreement opening it to the public.
At a time when neo-Nazis are burning copies of "The Diary of Anne Frank," there is significance to one line concealed here among the names of Jews brought to Holland's Westenbork camp on the way to Auschwitz: "Frank, Annelise."
The archive contains four collections. The 'imprisonment list' is the most interesting in terms of the information that it provides. It includes documents from concentration camps, ghettos and prison camps dating from 1933 to 1945. It was copied in its entirety in the 1950s by the Yad Vashem Holcaust Memorial and transfered to Jerusalem, but at Bad Arolsen it's more accessible. It has also been copied digitally in recent years and transfered to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. and to Yad Vashem, and may soon be accessible on the Internet.
The second collection contains 'documents from the period of the war,' with information about forced laborers in Germany beginning in 1939, including places of work and illness reports. The third collection, which is the largest, contains 'documents after the war,' with lists of all refugees and displaced persons who passed through Germany and all of Europe after the war. The fourth collection is information concerning lost children.
Inquiries can be submitted by telephone, mail or email. For example, an inquiry about a Jewish survivor of Buchenwald who immigrated to Israel could be answered by a list of deportees from the ghetto, information detailing a certain period in the camp or describing its liberation by the Americans, or lists from transit camps of people immigrating to Israel.
The ITS staff will conduct a search according to name, date and place of birth, and send the results to the inquirer, or invite him/her to the archive to look at the original documents. The ITS promises a response within eight weeks. Last year, it received 800 inquiries from Israel.
Last weekend, in one part of the archive, a book of the victims of the Matthausen concentration camp in Austria lay open on a table, where a staffer was working on an inquiry. The book reveals that on April 20, 1942, in honor of Hitler's 53rd birthday, 53 prisoners were executed. Their names were listed with times of death about two minutes apart between 11:20 and 12:54. Cause of death: 'Shot by order of the Reich defense ministry,' with space-saving 'ditto' markings beneath the first entry.
One of the names that came up randomly in the Auschwitz death book was M. Schlusser, a Jewish locksmith, who died on February 11, 1943. His parents' names and his place of birth were also noted, along with his age, 22, and cause of death: "exhaustion."
"There are apparently no new historical revelations about the Holocaust hiding here," Reto Meister, the ITS director says. "But there is an abundance of private historical information waiting for families of victims and survivors. We want to be a center to which families can come to get answers to the questions that trouble them."
And what does Meister say about the huge collection itself? "There is no doubt that human society has a strong need for order, which expresses itself in the recording of history. What for me is inconceivable is how this need was utilized so horrifically to destroy human beings. The obsessive recording of the Nazis was a kind of terrible way to pretend that something completely ordinary was going on."
The main feeling one gets from leafing through the well-ordered documents with their careful writing is how those 20 days at Majdanek, or those three years of the Final Solution, were truly ordinary for those who inscribed these lists.
Labels: Genocide, Nazi Germany, The Holocaust
