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Two historians from Bologna have devoted themselves to reconstructing the fates of the Italian “military internees” in German camps and prisons. In their efforts to learn more about this little-known aspect of Nazi history, Andrea Ferrari and Fabrizio Tosi of the National Association of Ex-Deportees into the Nazi Camps...

On International Women’s Day we are launching a series in commemoration of strong women who set an example with their will and their battle to survive. Grażyna Chrostowska was a Polish poetess and an activist in the underground. She was a mere twenty years old when she was shot to death in the Ravensbrück concentration...

Over 170,000 Jewish men and women were deported by the Nazis from the German Reich to ghettos or extermination camps, where most of them were murdered. These deportations are the focus of a new collection of sources assembled by Akim Jah from the International Tracing Service (ITS) and Marcus Gryglewski from the House...

In Melanie Haarmann’s family, no one ever said much about her grandfather’s brother Ernst Egon apart from: “He was killed in action.” Then she received a letter from the International Tracing Service (ITS). It said that the personal belongings the Nazis had taken from her great-uncle when they committed him to the...

In December 2018, Guy Allain’s daughter Brigitte received a very special package. It contained a wallet and two little strips of cloth. In the wallet there were two drawings. One is a scrap of squared paper with a pencil drawing of a cross with a heart at its center. The other, on a small slip of folded paper, is a...

H-Soz-Kult, a German-language experts’ forum for historians, has now published the proceedings of the international conference “Tracing and Documenting Victims of Nazi Persecution: History of the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Context,”. In the detailed report, Jonas Nachtigall of the Leipzig Nazi Forced Labour...

Braulia Cánovas Mulero was only twenty when she joined the French resistance, taking on the code name “Monique.” In 1943, the Nazis arrested her in Perpignan and deported her to Germany. She was in various concentration camps, and finally liberated in Bergen-Belsen. Her wristwatch and ring remained among the personal...

Three portfolios in the holdings of the ITS document an attempt undertaken by an investigative committee of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in 1946/47 to give victims of the death marches from Flossenbürg their names back. According to the investigation report: “The real purpose for...

In the spring of 1940, the Nazis launched a special campaign to murder Jewish sanatoria patients. Five women living at the Bathildisheim home in Arolsen in Northern Hesse – some of them for many years already– were subsequently taken to the “Landesheil- und Pflegeanstalt” (state sanatorium) in Giessen. They never...

January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Many of Germany’s soccer stadiums commemorate the persecution and murder of soccer players and club members by carrying out various actions on game days in late January. Back in 2004, the initiative !Nie wieder (Never Again) gave the impulse for this “German Soccer...