General Description
This on-line Inventory of the Archives of the International Tracing Service (ITS) provides an overview of the more than 21,000 separate historical "collections" of documentary material that are contained in the archives of ITS. Because this inventory is not the typical archival finding aid with which users may be familiar, a few notes regarding its origin, characteristics, and use are essential.
The inventory is based on a list of collections maintained over the years by ITS staff to track
a) the registration of Holocaust-era and early postwar documentation transferred by the Allied High Command for Germany in 1955; and
b) the receipt and registration of additional collections of archival materials deposited at ITS in the more that five decades that have passed since that time.
The ITS list of collections was thus organized chronologically by date of registration of each "deposit," starting with the massive deposits of documentation already accumulated by the time the Bonn Accords of 1955 were concluded, at which point the International Committee of the Red Cross assumed administrative responsibility of ITS. Since 1955, governments, private organizations, other archives, and even some private individuals have sent additional collections of documentary material to ITS, sometimes in the original and sometimes in copy form, and those very sizeable additional deposits were also recorded, chronologically by date of registration, on the ITS list of collections. ITS staff also copied some collections from other archives, and their addition to the collections was also recorded.
Each discrete deposit of documentary material at ITS is thus defined as a "collection" in the inventory. Some "collections" thus have just a few pages, while others may contain tens of thousands of pages. In addition, documents of similar origin and type, that one might expect to be found in a single archival collection, may be located in more than one collection in the ITS archives.
Currently, this inventory of collections is the only comprehensive listing of the historical collections in the ITS archives. Because of its origins as a registration tool, the inventory offers only a summary sketch of the contents of the archive, and not an in-depth view into the contents of every collection. It is not a complete catalog in the traditional sense, but rather a tool to begin exploration of the archive for the purpose of determining whether the information you seek or on the topic you wish to investigate may be contained there. This inventory does not identify by name all of the victims of National Socialism about whom the ITS archive contains information; searching this inventory for an individual victim's name is unlikely to produce a result.
In the vast majority of instances, the inventory provides only a brief description of what a collection contains. Most descriptions consist of only a line or two, used by the registrar to identify the collection, rather than to describe its full contents. Thus it is possible, and even likely, that many collections contain materials of greater diversity and relating to more topics than the short collection description in the inventory indicates. While the descriptions definitely capture at least some dominant elements of the contents of a collection, it is not possible to determine solely from the inventory the full contents of many of the collections listed. That will be possible only by looking at the documents themselves once additional cataloguing is achieved.
The on-line inventory contains up to ten information fields on each collection. Information is present in most fields for most collections, but is absent if it was not entered at the time the collection was originally registered at ITS. The information fields are as follows:
- Sheet Name (by spans of years in which collections were registered);
- Collection number (an arbitrarily assigned number for inventory processing purposes and is not a useful search field);
- A brief Description of the collection;
- The Source of the collection (what organization or individual deposited the materials, or what is the source archive of copies of documentation held elsewhere);
- Accession Date (the date the collection was registered at ITS);
- Number of Pages in the collection (sometimes shown file by file within a particular collection);
- Number of (victim) Names that appear in the collection;
- ITS File Location (the physical location where the collection is filed at the ITS archives in Bad Arolsen);
- Document Type (whether the documents in the collection are originals or copies);
- Carded (a notation made on occasion, but not consistently, to indicate that the names in the collection had been entered into the Central Name Index; this is not a useful field for search purposes, and the working assumption today is that victim names from all of the historical collections are in the Central Name Index).
The information fields for collections registered after June 2000, which were received in digital form, are slightly different because of the digital medium, but the essential information fields are the same. The single exception is the lack of collection-by-collection registration date. They can all be viewed as a group, however, through the "Sheet Name" search described below.
"Document type" indicates whether the documents are "originals" or "copies." Some subcategories of documents registered as copies are "Abschriften" (duplicates), "Fotokopien" (photocopies), "Rückvergrößerungen" (microfilm prints), and "Filme" (microfilm). It is important to bear in mind that some "copies" that exist at ITS are in fact "original copies," that is, the only known examples of the documents in question.
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