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Yom HaShoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is observed on the 27th of Nissan in the Jewish calendar, falls on April 24 this year. This Israeli memorial day commemorates the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and is dedicated to the memory of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. The central theme of this year’s...

When the first American soldiers reached the gate of the Buchenwald concentration camp at around 5:00 pm on April 11, 1945, inmate resistance groups had already taken control of the camp.

International Roma Day on April 8 celebrates the multifarious Romani cultures and their histories. Initiatives and associations also welcome it as an opportunity to call for action against the massive discrimination of Europe’s largest ethnic minority. Even after centuries of persecution and their systematic murder by...

Floriane Hohenberg has been the ITS director for fifteen months. She pursues efforts to raise national and international awareness of the institution’s significance as a primary source of information on Nazi crimes and their immediate aftermath. In the interview she talks about the ITS’s new strategic orientation.

Jozef Maria Van Hees was thirty-one when the Feldgendarmes arrested him in Merksplas, Belgium in October 1944. The young man had aided the resistance and been found out. The Nazis deported him via camp Amersfoort to the Neuengamme concentration camp, where he died just a few months later, in January 1945. His family...

For many years, the journalist Thomas Muggenthaler has been carrying out research at the International Tracing Service (ITS) and other archives on the topic he calls “The Love Crime: Polish Forced Laborers and German Women.” In March 2017 he presented his film—winner of the Bavarian TV Awards—at the ITS and talked...

The Association of Memorial Site Libraries (AGGB) convened at the International Tracing Service (ITS) from March 15–17 for its 2017 annual meeting.

Maria Melina Scaffidi began working for the International Tracing Service (ITS) in March 1967. She was fifteen years old at the time, and had come to Northern Hesse from Milazzo in Sicily. She started out as a typist and later served for more than twenty years as the secretary of the Italian liaison mission at the ITS....

The filmmaker Matthew Steinhart is the grandson of Jewish emigrants who fled from the Nazis. In early February 2017, he came to the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen to shoot footage for his film on the fate of his family during the Nazi period. “I want to put special emphasis on the traces and...

For five days, representatives from various institutions that work with the digital database of the International Tracing Service (ITS) conferred in two joint workshops in Bad Arolsen. The meetings take place regularly and serve the exchange of information and the improvement of access to the documents in the ITS...