Testimonies to the Magnitude of Slave Labour
The International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen has completed the digitalization of its documents on forced labour in the “Third Reich”. The Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw are receiving a copy of the data today. “The documents attest to the monstrous dimension of slave labour during the national socialist reign,” said Udo Jost, head of the archive. “The labour of so-called foreign workers was exploited in nearly every economic sector and region.”
ITS has scanned and indexed over 6.7 million documents (around 13 million images) concerning forced labour during the Nazi regime and immediate post-war period. The data volume amounts to a total of 1.87 terabytes. “The digitalisation serves the protection and conservation of the original documents,” said Jost. “At the same time, it allows for better access to the documents, whether on location at ITS or at one of our partner organizations in Israel, the US or Poland.” As ruled by the ITS International Commission, which supervises the Tracing Service’s work, each of the eleven member states can receive digital copies of the documents archived in Bad Arolsen.
The documents being handed over today are original files from the Nazi period that concern individual people. These primarily include employment records of slave labourers, patients’ files and insurance documents, as well as registry cards from the authorities, health insurance agencies and employers. In addition, ITS also scanned lists that had been compiled in early 1946 by command of the Western Allies. All German municipalities had to report the residency of foreigners and German Jews during World War II to the allied tracing service bureaus. The lists contain details on places of residence, employers, employment periods, marriages, births and gravesites.
The documents were needed for reuniting families and repatriation immediately after the war. They were also used by the ITS later on for verifications within the scope of forced labourer indemnity funds. Since the opening of the archive in November 2007 scholars can, with the help of the documents, research the magnitude of forced labour under the Nazi regime. “The documents provide information on the living conditions of foreign workers and their deployment in specific regions or at individual companies,” explained Jost.
Estimations of the number of forced labourers during the “Third Reich” era assume that over twelve million people were affected, including roughly 8.4 million civil workers. Slave labourers were deployed in all areas of economic life from mining, industry and administration, to small trade and farming.
Following the digitalization of the stock of the documents on forced labour, on imprisonment at concentration camps and prisons (approximately 18 million scans), the ITS Central Name Index (around 42 million scans) and the index cards of displaced persons (roughly seven million scans), the digitalization of documents from post-war DP camps is the next major project on which work recently started. Over 70 percent of the documents stored at ITS have been able to be scanned and indexed in so far. Digitalization of the entire archive is expected to be completed in 2011.
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