Bad Arolsen: Post-war digitization complete

The International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen, Germany has completed the digitizing of documents on displaced persons and emigration after WWII.

See the press release at International Tracing Service (ITS).

“This part of the ITS archives has hardly been explored so far,” said Udo Jost, Head of the Archive Division. “It offers excellent insights into life after survival, as well as the wave of migration which resulted from the war.”

This week, ITS forwarded copies of the documents to its partner organisations in Israel, the US, Poland, Luxembourg and Belgium.

The documents provide information on the fate of those who were rescued from concentration camps, forced labour and, in some cases, war captivity. This inventory specifically comprises documents from German, Austrian, Italian and British camps for displaced persons, as well as emigration lists, files and dossiers from refugee organisations such as the UNHCR, and lists of Holocaust survivors compiled by Jewish organisations.

Among the preserved DP camp documents are 350,000 CM1 questionnaires issued by the Allies. The forms documented what the people had experienced and the reasons for their desire to emigrate.

The digitization of the entire inventory of post-war documents took 18 months and can be viewed and searched on-site in Bad Arolsen.

This week, ITS forwarded copies of some.3 million images of documents from refugee organisations and Austrian, Italian and British DP Camps to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, DC), the Institute of National Remembrance (Warsaw), the Documentation and Research Centre on the Resistance (Luxembourg) and the National Archives of Belgium (Brussels).

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