News archive

The new US Consul General in Frankfurt am Main, Edward M. Alford, sees the future of the International Tracing Service (ITS) as a research center. “When the last victim passes on, the documents must bear witness to the enormity of the Nazi atrocities,” said the US representative during a visit to the archive, which...

It was not the search for a relative but for three notebooks from a great aunt´s estate which led Heinz Bachmann from Switzerland to the ITS (International Tracing Service) in Bad Arolsen. Buchenwald concentration camp survivor Marton Stark had recorded his experiences in the notebooks at the end of 1945. “I was deeply...

The well-known journalist and publicist Volker Koop sifted through the archives of the International Tracing Service (ITS) late in September gathering material for his new book project on the so-called “Sonder- und Ehrenhäftlinge” (special inmates and prisoners of honour) of the concentration camps. The high-ranking...

Research for his doctoral thesis brought Andreas Ehresmann, Director of the Sandbostel memorial site, to the International Tracing Service (ITS) in mid-September. The subject of his thesis is the reconstruction of the architectural history of Neuengamme concentration camp. “This is the first thesis of its kind”,...

It has been eleven years now that the Dutch journalist Remco Reiding for the first time set his foot on the Russian cemetery near former concentration camp Amersfoort, not knowing that he would be under the sway of this place ever since. Reiding retraces the life story of the people buried there undertaking a parallel...

Working on a project of the Vienna-based Ludwig Boltzmann institute for Historical Sociology, historian Alexander Prenninger retraced persecution routes at the archives of the International Tracing Service (ITS) for a week. His pertinent findings will become part of a comparative study on oral memory reports delivered...

About 130 guests – among them mayor Jürgen van der Horst, the member of the regional parliament Reinhard Kahl, Professor Dietfrid Krause-Vilmar and Ernst Klein from the association “Gegen das Vergessen” (counteracting oblivion) – were welcomed to the opening of the exhibition “Private Tolkatchev – At the Gates of...

Dr. Beate Welter, director of the memorial at the SS special camp/concentration camp Hinzert, spent 3 days at the beginning of September researching documents at the International Tracing Service (ITS) archive.  She found information on the camp, examined transport lists and studied the fates of individual...

A delegation of the “Bundesbeauftragten für die Unterlagen des ehemaligen Staatssicherheitsdienstes der DDR (BStU)” (Special Federal Representative responsible for preserving the documents of the former State Security Service of the GDR) came to visit the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen on 25th...

Over the past week, Professor Johannes-Dieter Steinert was carrying out research into the subject of “Child Forced Labour in National Socialist Germany and German occupied Eastern Europe from 1939 to 1945” at the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen. For two years, the Professor for Contemporary European...