News archive

Retrace the footsteps of Jewish children in Berlin – now it’s possible with the “Marbles of Remembrance” app. An international team developed it late last year at the culture hackathon “Coding da Vinci” in Berlin. The basis for this and another project was the card file of the Reich Association of Jews which the...

The historian Dr. Bernd Joachim Zimmer of Bad Arolsen, who had close ties to the International Tracing Service (ITS) through his research, died in May 2018. The studied math and physics teacher had set himself the task of investigating the history of the city of Bad Arolsen in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Malgorzata Przybyla, an employee at the International Tracing Service (ITS), recently returned the personal possessions of a former concentration camp prisoner to his relatives in Poland. The objects included a signet ring. It played a special role in the search for this family.

With a team of experienced curators at their side, Isabel Panek, Henning Borggräfe and Christian Höschler are presently preparing the first permanent exhibition on the ITS past and present, scheduled to open in 2019. In the interview, they explain what the show’s main focusses will be and what challenges they face.

Gershon Willinger was born in Amsterdam on 24 September 1942. His parents had fled Germany. But after the occupation of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany, the persecution of the Jews also started there. Guido and Edith Helene Willinger were among the more than 100,000 Jews deported from the occupied Netherlands to the...

An important package is presently on its way to Poland. It contains a wristwatch and a necklace with a crucifix pendant—two items once belonging to Bolesław Hermanowicz.

Members of Historical, Educational and Remembrance Initiatives are invited to apply for a three-day research seminar by May 1, 2018. The seminar will take place at the ITS in Bad Arolsen, June 25 – 27, 2018. It is hosted by the ITS and the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the...

A wallet containing photos, an armband and an inmate’s tag with the number 38870 from the Royallieu internment and transit camp near Compiègne: those are the personal belongings her father Victor had to relinquish when the Nazis deported him in 1944.

Werner Hansch is a legend among sports commentators and known as the “voice of the Ruhr Valley.” He has a special connection to the International Tracing Service (ITS). In 2014, he learned by chance that the ITS archive might have information about his father’s persecution in its holdings.

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...