News archive

Jan van Ommen spent a day at the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen viewing documents on nearly 200 Dutch women. They had been deported from the Herzogenbusch (Vught) concentration camp to Ravensbrück when the Allied forces moved closer in September 1944. “My mother Rinsje was one of these women,” says...

Gesher Calmenson, founder of the program “Remember Us: The Holocaust Bnai Mitzvah Project” visited the International Tracing Service (ITS) at the beginning of July accompanied by his wife Cynthia and Anna Cremaldi.The three Californians wanted to personally view documents held by the ITS as well as introduce their...

Julia Drinnenberg of Hofgeismar´s City Museum visited the International Tracing Service (ITS) at the end of June to research the fate of the Segal family, who were housed in Hofgeismar´s Displaced Persons (DP) camp. “I found the family´s DP registration cards at the ITS,” she reported.

Barbara Hintermann, responsible for operations West (North America and Europe) within the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), has come to Bad Arolsen today to get an overview of the activities of the International Tracing Service (ITS). Beginning with 1st June 2010, Hintermann has taken administrative...

The suffering of the victims of medical trials is in the fore of the research Professor Hans-Jürg Kuhn conducts at the International Tracing Service (ITS) at Bad Arolsen. Within this general field of interest, he places special emphasis on the typhus fever experiments carried out on prisoners at Natzweiler...

Preparing his master’s degree, the Freiburg student Christian Kretschmer deals with the subjects of “Prisoners of war in Mauthausen Concentration Camp“ and the “Mühlviertler Hasenjagd” (Mühlviertel hare hunting), a war event that took place in February 1945. During his research visit to the archives of the...

Four students of the Technical University of Darmstadt spent a week at the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen pursuing research on the camp for Jewish Displaced Persons at Zeilsheim near Frankfurt/Main. “As school lessons usually draw the line of historical analysis at the end of the war, the post-war...

Paul Shapiro, the Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s (USHMM) Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies and member of the International Commission for the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen, was presented yesterday Germany’s highest civilian recognition - the Cross of the Order of...

The children of the “Lebensborn” are haunted by the shadows of the past. The silence kept by their mothers, the search for their own identities and the myths grown up around the SS association have been preoccupying the minds of those affected to this day. Ingeborg Schinke, Astrid Eggers and Elke Sauer came...

Joachim Gauck, Chairman of the association “Against Oblivion – For Democracy”, came to see the International Tracing Service (ITS) at Bad Arolsen yesterday. “The visit had long been overdue”, so Gauck. “I am struck and stunned by what I was shown.” He visited the archives, informed himself of the structural build-up of...