News archive

In the autumn of 1948, search bureaus of various European states accepted an invitation from the recently established International Tracing Service (ITS) and came together, for the first time, in Arolsen, North Hesse, Germany. On the occasion of the anniversary of this event, the ITS will host an international academic...

The library catalog of the International Tracing Service (ITS) is now available in a new online version. Researchers and visitors can get information in advance about the library's holdings and better prepare their research stays at the ITS. The catalogue was so far only available on site.

Annelies Sijtsma-Hoezen is one of the volunteers helping the ITS in the search for the rightful owners of personal belongings of concentration camp inmates. She started researching right after the ITS published the photos and names on its online archive in 2015. She’s meanwhile found about thirty families.

“My late father cherished the hope that my mother and I would keep his brother’s memory alive,” Nathalie Devroey told us when she came to the International Tracing Service (ITS) in early 2018 to look at original documents pertaining to her uncle Charles Devroey’s fate. She had brought an extensive and very impressive...

Thomas Porena, who is earning a doctorate in Southeast European History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, conducted research at the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen for a project on double deportees. In this interview he talks about the difficulties of the research and the important finds in the ITS...

From the treatment of pregnant forced labourers to women forced into prostitution in concentration camps: the first issue of a new online series of publications based on documents from the International Tracing Service (ITS) archive, is dedicated to particular forms of exploitation and persecution of women by the...

Saida Kikhlyarova from Azerbaijan is twenty-six years old and the first volunteer to come to the International Tracing Service (ITS) through Action Reconciliation: Service for Peace (ARSP). In Azerbaijan she studied foreign language education. Thanks to the six languages she speaks and her strong dedication, she was...

Argentinean victims of the Holocaust are the research topic of Marcia Ras, PhD candidate at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. As an EHRI fellow, she spent a few weeks in Bad Arolsen at the ITS in January and February 2018. In an interview she told us about her research and her findings.

To obtain further information about his grandfather’s fate, Marco Moisello and his wife set out from Italy at the end of January 2018 to visit the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen. The National Socialists had arrested Francesco Moisello in his native Genoa in 1944. He never came home again.

The purpose of the Olympic Games is to unite nations in fair sports competitions. In 1936, the Winter Olympics took place in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. With the aid of the Nazi propaganda machine, Germany strove to present itself there as a liberal-minded nation, in which context the Winter Games served as a dress...