PAUL SHAPIRO

Opened records give survivors peace of mind

By POLINA OLSEN

article created on: 2008-11-15T00:00:00

Closed to the public until recently, documentation gathered during concentration camp liberation brings new hope to those searching for lost family. Allies established the International Tracing Service after World War II in Bad Arolsen, Germany. Today, the organization’s archives contain the world’s largest collection of Nazi records.

“It’s not the kind of victory you want to celebrate,” Holocaust expert Paul Shapiro told the group gathered at the Mittleman Jewish Community Center on Oct 22. As Director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Shapiro spent more than eight years trying to open the ITS records. In Portland for a lecture sponsored by the Jewish Genealogical Society of Oregon and MJCC, he explained the archive’s contents and the struggle to make them public.

The ITS Records

They kept records to show how well they were doing their job, Shapiro said, referring to the Nazi obsession with administrative detail. Documents seized by camp liberators ranged from Gestapo orders to reports listing the number of lice in each prisoner’s hair.

After the war, the collection grew to 50 million pages referencing 17.5 million individuals and included displaced person registration, testimonies from liberated survivors and inquiries.

In 1955, the Red Cross took over the archive’s administration under the supervision of an international commission comprised of Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland and the United States.

Shapiro illustrated the archive’s magnitude with the Dec. 16, 2006, CBS 60 Minutes program. Reporters brought Auschwitz survivor Miki Schwartz of San Diego to Bad Arolsen and showed him a chilling record. A list of teenagers bound for a munitions plant called Dora included his name—crossed out. Few survived Dora; Schwartz had no idea why he’d been spared.

Records Shapiro displayed went beyond the 60 Minutes episode. Piecing together Bad Arolsen documents, he said, “opens a window on the daily fate of people taken by Nazis.” An infirmary list showed a timely strep throat had saved Schwartz’s life. The archives also contained documents Schwartz signed when he entered Auschwitz and photographs of him at liberation.

Keeping the records quiet

Although established to help trace missing persons, ITS, in fact, stonewalled most requests. As Shapiro pushed for opening the archives, others on the international commission blocked progress. Ostensibly, the concern was privacy for example, the records could lead to accusations of Nazi collaboration.

Bureaucracy, too, slowed the records release, Shapiro said. Each of the 11 countries had a reason. “Some had to do with the history, some with relationships with other members of the commission, some with fear of acting on terrain about which they knew nothing. At the bottom line – it wasn’t considered important enough for governments to really engage the subject and deal with it. If we were dealing with an archive that was important to 1,000 millionaires, it would have been done.”

Finally, in 2006, Germany dropped its opposition and the other countries followed. The ITS archives at Bad Arolsen opened November 2007.

Digitized copies of the entire collection are available to each commission country.

USHMM will receive the final installment in 2010. Although currently the image format makes electronic searching impossible, a team has already answered more than 7,000 requests.

After listening to Shapiro’s lecture, Eva Aigner, of Portland, said, “I’m one of the youngest survivors in the Oregon area, and I’m 71. This is going to be helpful for a lot of people from the survivors group. It will give them peace-of-mind to know what happened to their family.”

For more information on the ITS visit www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/its or call 866-912-4385.