News archive

On 8 September 2012, staff of the International Tracing Service (ITS) could return the personal belongings of former prisoners from the concentration camp Neuengamme to eleven Dutch families at the Amersfoort Memorial. “It’s a pity I do not remember my father”, said Wilhelmina van Beek-Dijkhuizen who received letters...

About 140 guests attended a memory event held at the Volkmarsen “Nordhessen” hall on 9 September 2012 to mark the 70th anniversary of the third deportation of Jews from the Kassel district. “There are no words to express the suffering the people went through, but we can pay our respect to the victims“, stated Ernst...

Early in September 2012, six pupils of the Münster Annette-von-Droste-Hülshoff College came to the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen to investigate the subject “Individuals and Individual Rights in the Lublin Area”. They cast light on diverse aspects of the Germanization and Aryanization, the...

Holocaust survivor Felix Cytrin was one of the prisoners who were employed by the Nazis in the largest counterfeiting operation during the Second World War: Operation Bernhard in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Jewish prisoners were forced to forge foreign currency in the billions. The operation was designed to...

The International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen is planning a travelling exhibition entitled “Life in transit - trauma and new beginnings. Survivors of Nazi persecution.” Items from displaced persons´ lives are being sought, such as photographs, report cards, voting papers, newspapers, posters, certificates or...

Picking up the trail of his granduncle Joseph who had disappeared without a trace in 1945, Laurent Guillet and his companions, a forty-person team, had a short stop also at the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen. The institution’s French Liaison Mission had contributed to the book he titled “Il...

“As long as I find people I will continue to do this,” says Kitty Brom from Hummelo, the Netherlands. The hobby genealogist helps locate relatives of former concentration camp inmates so that the International Tracing Service (ITS) can return their personal effects. The ITS archive still contains nearly 2,900 personal...

Vladimir Kukin, director of the Office of Maintenance of War Graves and Commemoration Work in the embassy of the Russian Federation in Berlin, spent two days at the International Tracing Service (ITS / International Tracing Service) in Bad Arolsen to get an overview of the archival records, the request handling, and...

Pava Raibstein, Director of the Youth Aliyah Committee in Frankfurt, recently visited the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen to explore the possibility of a collaboration. Her visit was twofold: she was also interested in discovering details about her father´s fate. “I know the basics about my father´s...

For several days, Claudia Stefanetti Kozrowicz of the University of Buenos Aires researched in the archives of the International Tracing Service (ITS) the subject of Polish Displaced Persons (DPs) who immigrated to Argentina after the Second World War. "We are aware of the two groups -- of the former Nazis and of...