Follow Waltzer's work and that of his colleagues at the workshop as he posts entries in his "Bad Arolsen Journal" from June 16 through June 26. 

June 25, 2008

Things went well with our reports to ITS and to visiting press during a long, muggy, and rainy day today. My colleagues were upbeat, positive, and detailed and did great jobs describing parts of the collection – camp records, forced labor records, displaced person records, and general records – and then exploring small projects they carried out or that should be done in the future.

The general thrust of presentations was that the collection is a goldmine for doing certain research (not all kinds), and that there ought to be attention at ITS to linking or bringing parts of the archive together that once were united.

The sense was that the collection is and will be an important venue for new history on the Nazi Holocaust – including local history studies of particular transports, social history studies of the fates of people from particular towns in the camps, and specialized studies of groups of prisoners – women, children and youths, and others. It will be a place where the everyday practices of persecution beyond the juridical can be studied and where historical and comparative work on the camps and on the slave labor and forced labor systems that coexisted under Nazi rule can be carried out. The Displaced Person records also provide a basis for writing a massive history or histories of the European upheaval at mid-century, with global implications, since European refugees went everywhere.

Personally, I found the forced labor records discussion fascinating. Alongside the Nazi concentration camp and slave labor system, the Nazis built a forced labor system of great range and size. Forced labor involving foreign workers existed in the web of local German society. Laborers worked for firms but also for local professionals and churches and on farms. My colleagues did regional studies of forced labor that included local towns, particularly Kassel and Bad Arolsen. The two labor systems appeared to resemble pre-war American slavery (slave labor) and post-war American sharecropping (forced labor) and also to be new. Forced labor was better and freer than slave labor, of course, but both were forms of bondage. Forced laborers worked on contracts, could complain to authorities about contract violations, and took leaves and visited families. But violations of contracts and other behaviors could land forced laborers in the camps as slaves.

Konrad Kwiet thinks the archive should be a European-wide institution, a repository for studying aspects of the upheaval of Europe. His group made a good case for the value of the Displaced Person documents in the ITS collection, noting the number and the variety of displaced persons (about 350,000 at war’s end) and the richness of holdings that include people’s stories, their strategies and choices after upheaval, and trace elements of what had happened to them and where they sought to go. The end of colonialism, the displacement of peoples in Europe, and the refugee movement mark this as a caesura of European history.

I made a final set of discoveries in my own work. Block 66 was a haven for children and youths during the final three months of Buchenwald, I knew. In the end, some 900-1000 boys were clustered here, including Elie Wiesel. But today I discovered a set of books marked Verlegungen inerhalben der blocks (transfers among the blocks), and quickly the numerical history of block 66 unfolded. The block was populated by mid-January 1945, then older prisoners were moved out and newer, younger prisoners were brought in – especially during late January and early February. The youngest prisoners, including Israel Lau, were placed in block 8. The coincidence of the coming of large transports of boys from the evacuation of Auschwitz (January 22, 23, and 26) with the commitment by the German Communist-led international resistance to assist them, led on January 25-26 to a huge transfer, opening up block 66 for clustering boys. Nearly 170 boys were moved in, then 180 boys, then another 95, and then 77 as new transports came from Gross Rosen. I’m not sure I’ve got all the numbers, but I now see the timing of and trajectory of the building of the main rescue block.

The computer consultant to ITS approached me tonight at dinner and said it was now possible to search the entire camp records database by birth date – that is, by age. One could thus ask for a sample of names and birthdates of all children in all the camps – all those born, say, in 1930 or 1931 and after. I am intrigued with the possibility of studying children in and across the camps.

Tomorrow, I will participate in the final ITS discussions during the morning, then pack up and head from Kassel to Weimar to be ready to speak at Buchenwald. I want to say tonight how well we’ve been treated here and what good, nice, sharp people are at ITS under the current leadership. Reto Meister, the director; Udo Jost, the head archivist; and Irmtrud Wojak, the new historian, are top-notch folks who have listened and engaged with us solidly and who have their own good ideas about how to use the current moment to preserve and strengthen this institution, charged with stewardship of these important materials, and also to make it into something new.

June 24, 2008

The ITS collection includes hundreds of books like these -- called blockbücher -- that list the blocks, or buildings, where each concentration camp prisoner lived. In volume after volume, they record where prisoners were bunked or transferred and where they were sent for slave labor.

The time has gone very quickly here in Bad Arolsen – curious, because this is a really quiet German town. We’ve all spent our time actively exploring the ITS collections, meeting and speaking with ITS staff, and getting ready to report. This occurs tomorrow, then Thursday will be our last day with a final discussion, and we will then head in different directions. I go on to Buchenwald, where I will lecture to archives and museum staff and meet with the documents and photo archivists on Friday.

I want to say something about whether the ITS archive is a Holocaust archive or not. It is and it isn’t, but I’ve been in some sharp discussions today with colleagues who say it is not. Theirs is a curiously truncated view of the Holocaust – or an expansive view of the archives as a window into 1940s Europe. Let me say that my view is that the ITS archive is extremely relevant for Holocaust study in two ways: first, it captures in documents the experiences of the many scores of thousands who at Auschwitz and elsewhere were selected for slave labor and entered into the Nazi concentration camp system; second, there are trace elements in the camp records of what happened to the family and relatives of those who were sent to be exploited and worked to death. In each camp, new prisoners were asked who and where their parents were. Often the answers were general or vague, but these records are not yet tapped. Such names are not even in the 17.5 million names in the ITS central names register.

Some colleagues desire in the best sense to stress that the bulk of the collection is not about the Holocaust or about European Jews. They point out correctly that the majority of the prisoners in the Nazi camp system were non-Jews, a variety of Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, Germans, French, Dutch, Belgians, Danish, and many others, and a majority of the displaced persons were also non-Jews. This is an archive then that documents the coerced movement and forced exploitation of a large share of the European population, not just the targeted groups of the Holocaust. It is also an archive that focuses on the apparatuses of persecution, from Gestapo surveillance and imprisonment practices before the war to Nazi terror and recruitment of prisoners into complicity and the terrorization and dehumanization of prisoners thereafter.

Today, I wrapped up a few items in my own research. I focused in particular on the youngest three boys, looking for clues and insights again in the records for where they were sheltered in the camp and by whom. Idele Henechowicz, whom I have mentioned earlier, was sent out to Bergen-Belsen and liberated there. He was not yet three years old at liberation. Stefan Jerzy Zweig and Josef Schleifstein (Janek Szlajfsztajn) were in Buchenwald with their fathers but appear to have been specially helped by elements of the Communist-led underground. They were each four years old at liberation. During late September 1944, Stefan Jerzy Zweig was protected against transport to Auschwitz by being shot up in the hospital with typhus vaccine to spike a fever and was removed from the transport list. Another boy was sent instead. Stefan was thereafter moved about in hiding in the camp, watched over by underground activists. Janek Szlajfsztajn, who arrived in mid-January 1945, may have been sheltered with his father for a time but he was also listed as an inhabitant of children’s block 66 with perhaps 900-1000 other boys. These young boys are still alive and well, mature men today in their mid 60s.

I also focused on a group of teenage boys from Lodz, who in early fall 1944 had contiguous numbers at Auschwitz and in late January 1945 were in Buchenwald. These were among the first inhabitants of the children’s block 66, where they remained until liberation. Finally, I read through changes in the block lists at Buchenwald during early 1945. Block transfers made the camp a more kinetic place than I imagined, and prisoners came and went in significant numbers in block 66 in the winter of 1945. That is, the block not only grew in numbers but also changed in composition. I also looked for what I could find on Gustav Schiller, the deputy block elder of the barrack, who was a mentor to many of the boys, and a tough, uncompromising figure. He had been in Buchenwald since 1940, and was a brick mason tied to the underground and probably a former Polish Communist. Many boys I’ve interviewed talk about “Red Gustav,” as does Elie Wiesel in Night.

Tomorrow I’m talking on “Moving from Genealogy to Social History: Doing Social History inside the Concentration Camps.” I will explain to staff and press how social history that focuses on groups differs from genealogy, which focuses on individuals and families, but these different disciplines draw on remarkably common kinds of records. I will talk about immigration history as a form of social history. I will then explore how the records in the concentration camp section resembled records we use in immigration history and how, if bundled and linked appropriately, they can be used to get at the social history of the camps. I will show the audience examples of transport records that carry information similar to turn-of-the-century ship manifests carrying immigrants to the New World, and examples of spatial records (what blocks or commandos the prisoners were placed in) that resemble census manuscript returns. I will show how samples of people from similar towns, or of similar background, or of people of specific categories, like children and youths, can be traced inside the camps and questions asked about whether these people were all alone or with and reliant on others, and whether they had space in such arrangements to exert agency and make their own narrow choices about adjustment and coping strategies in the effort to endure. I think the answer is yes, that even in the belly of the Nazi beast, amidst “the order of terror,” prisoners remained human to an extent, banded with limited others, and sought to hold on and survive.

June 23, 2008

Among the documents at the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany, are room-fulls of boxes containing paper cards (now digitized and searchable by computer database) listing personal names and details for some 17.5 million individuals affected by the Holocaust.

It was back to work in the Red Cross ITS archive today and the beginning of a countdown to when we make presentations to the archive staff, Paul Shapiro of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies and CAHS staff, and the international press.

Our scholars’ group has been examining the concentration camp records at ITS, which include about 18 million pieces of paper, and is the first group to report. We'll be followed by other groups that have examined the forced labor, displaced persons, and ITS administrative records. We’re up Wednesday morning, so we put our heads together this afternoon, led by Elissa Mailaender-Koslov, to develop the main thrust of our report.

We are asked to comment on the general structure and content of the collection and to identify key parts for priority cataloguing and detailed emphasis. We are asked to evaluate the scholarly potential of the collection and perhaps to share insights that the collection, properly tapped, might or will convey. Finally, we are asked to explore specific research projects that might fit with the collection and its holdings and to assess in what ways the collection may or may not add to our understanding of Nazi persecution during the 1930s and 1940s and of the experiences of the Nazis’ many victims.

A huge cloud of expectation hangs over all this, so it might be best to first address what opening ITS to researchers and scholars does to our knowledge of the Nazi Holocaust. Some survivors and families and some in the public have outsized expectations of what will be revealed when ITS is opened. The concentration camp records are largely the records of the Nazi camps in Germany and Austria that were liberated by the Allied armies. There is less from the camps in the Nazi-occupied east, in Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine, which were liberated by the Soviets. Strictly speaking, then, the archives will reveal only a little bit about key aspects of the Holocaust, mainly about Auschwitz, for ITS holdings are thin on the Operation Reinhard camps, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, and on the mobile persecution of Jews by Einsatzgruppen and the Nazi order police. They are also thin on the eastern ghettos.

This said, there will nonetheless certainly be an important payoff in terms of the greater availability of information on and about Holocaust victims, selected at Auschwitz or elsewhere for work in the concentration camps after mid-1944, and who were transported around the system and to outlying commandos until liberation. A large share of the survivors were freed by the Allies, and they and their families will be much better informed on what happened at (among other places) Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthaussen, and many auskommandos. Some survivors and their families have already been in touch asking about Buchenwald and Schlieben, to which many prisoners were shipped in 1944-1945 to help make the Panzerfaust. Being able to see the personal card envelopes of many prisoners will enrich our view of the complex circuit of coerced and terrorized travel and work system in place until the Third Reich came crashing down.

But the archives at Bad Arolsen will also reveal a lot, it should be emphasized, about other victims in the Nazi camps, including German, Polish, French, and Czech political prisoners, Soviet prisoners-of-war, and many, many others. They were the majority in what one writer has called “the concentrationary universe,” and they constructed their own forms of response and prisoner society against their overlords inside the system. They also comprised the majority of the millions of forced laborers who worked in somewhat better conditions under the German overlords. 

ITS, then, serves as something of a window not only onto a part of the Nazi Holocaust but also onto the large-scale upheaval and transformation of the European continent and its labor supply during this period. Europe ceased to be a center for many peoples during the 1940s, not merely Jews. Many of these camp and forced labor people subsequently were part of the displaced persons numbers who settled elsewhere in Europe and also affected other lands far away from Europe through post-war migration.

We tend to think, then, and so we will say on Wednesday, that the collection holds all sorts of promise for scholars who want to study the development of the camp system, that is, to historicize the camps and study their growth and increasing connections during the 1930s and 1940s. We think also that the detailed materials available for some of the camps, if not all, notably for Buchenwald, Dachau, and Mauthaussen, but not Bergen-Belsen, will enable us to probe aspects of the structure and functioning of the camps beyond the juridical (that is, the practical workings of these places); to explore specific groups in the camps and their histories, often with an accompanying broadened sense of the diversity in these camps; and, in general, to open new possibilities for doing the social history of prisoner functionaries and of prisoners in the camps.

The Gestapo records reveal the growth and change in methods of persecution and the creation of more complex penal and camp institutions; the records of the camps themselves – all the transport lists, zugangsbucher, block bucher, and transport lists to auskommandos, together with remarkable personal card files – make possible the study of the camps as complex social places filled with small groups from particular towns and backgrounds, even with small fragments of social networks and families as well as terrorized prisoners. 

Wolfgang Sofksy’s The Order of Terror serves as a taking-off-and-arguing-against point for most of us as it does for those in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum who are now compiling an encyclopedia of camps and ghettos. Sofsky posited the camps as a world apart, a regime of absolute power; he overlooked the diversity of the camps, both comparatively and across time, and he overstated the consequence for prisoners of becoming a coerced, seriated mass. The collection here enables us to see the camps as distinct and different, albeit parts of a synergistic, terrible, and gigantic system, and it also helps us sense the great complexity of movement and re-movement that pulsed through the nasty Nazi web. In this kinetic picture, prisoner functionaries and prisoners possibly found resistance modes and forms of adaptive strategies of their own to fight off power and its effects and to express personal meaning while holding on, enduring, and seeking to survive.

Each of us will then provide examples of the kinds of specific projects that might be undertaken and even supported in a refurbished and strengthened ITS archive. Elisa Mailaender-Koslov will talk about the Gestapo records and what they reveal about the evolution of persecution methods during the 1930s and 1940s. Jessica Anderson Hughes will explore the poor German women who populated the brothels in eight Nazi camps and who sought to earn their way out of captivity (none did). Alexandre Doulut will talk about how the records make possible fuller documentation of the native French Jews and also refugee Jews from Germany and Belgium who were deported from his small southwestern French town. Finally, Ken Waltzer will talk about the camp records and how they can be linked to study what happened to people from shared towns in the camps, what happened to children and youths, and what happened to many prisoners who were or were not helped by others. 

June 22, 2008

Ken Waltzer at the Bergen-Belsen museum

At the Bergen-Belsen memorial museum and documentation center near Hanover, Germany, Ken Waltzer examines a series of photos taken in 1945 showing child survivors of the notorious concentration camp and the heroic women who helped save them.

Today we took a day off from work in the ITS archive and traveled north to Bergen-Belsen, former Nazi concentration camp site, where a new museum opened this past fall. We were greeted and introduced to the museum, then given an overview of the site. After walking around the now-barren area viewing the memorials, we returned to explore the very good and substantial exhibition inside the nicely designed, modernist cement museum.

The museum depicted the concentration camp as a growing, changing place, which at various times held Soviet prisoners of war, exchange prisoners, Italian prisoners of war, Polish uprising prisoners, and then thousands and thousands of women, men, and children who were evacuated from camps to the east—including Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, and others—and were dumped in this crowded, terrible place. It is said that the camp site holds 50,000 bodies buried in mass graves.

The exhibition also had an additional portion devoted to memorializing the "DP" (Displaced Persons) camp that arose on a site nearby where many Jewish survivors lived for a time in the post-war period, emphasizing the “return to life,” the rebirth of spirit and society in the shadow of the Holocaust. The museum was silent so far as I saw on the relationship between the camp and the surrounding German society.

I spent a lot of time looking for images of a kinderheim (children’s home) that came to exist in the last part of the war in a section of Belsen. It was presided over by three medical/nurse figures among the prisoners, and they were responsible for saving the lives of 90 children. While typhus ravaged the camp in the winter months of 1945, killing off Anne Frank and her sister Margot Frank, in this separate barrack the children had access to occasional milk and salamis and were reasonably cared for. Only one child, I believe, was lost to typhus. I know of the home because several boys from Piotrkow, near Lodz, who were brought to Buchenwald in December 1944, were in turn sent to Belsen in January 1945, ostensibly to die. This event had a marked effect on prisoner society inside Buchenwald. But at Belsen they were taken to this kinderheim, initially established to care for the Dutch Jewish “diamond” children, and they were cared for by Ada Bimko, Luba Tryszynska, and Herminie Katz, the three principal female figures. Luba was later dubbed “The Angel of Belsen” and honored by the Dutch government.

I found several images taken by a British soldier named Oakes on April 20, five days after liberation, of the children in the home—looking healthy and happy in their new freedom. A British film taken the same day that is in the Imperial War Museum in London, and which is shown as part of the exhibition, clearly shows the children lined up at a barbed wire fence, standing with Luba. I looked for the youngest child at Buchenwald, Idele Henechowicz, who—born in June 1942—had been two and a half years old when he entered Buchenwald and was registered as a prisoner. He was still not yet three when he was liberated with the other children by the British soldiers. A memoir sold in the Bergen-Belsen museum bookstore, by one of the former Dutch Jewish diamond children, Hetty Werkendam Verolme, recalls Idele, who was much attached to teenager Hetty, running, bringing up the rear, as all the children ran to meet their British liberators. Most of these children afterward were returned to Holland or, in the case of the Polish Jews, taken to Switzerland. Little Idele was adopted in Finland, studied in England, and today lives in western Canada and speaks about his experience to schoolchildren.

June 20, 2008

Yesterday I followed the trail of the Kovno boys again from Dachau to Auschwitz and to Buchenwald or Mauthausen. I was testing whether I could get inside the Mauthausen camp in the same way I can inside Buchenwald. But the Kovno boys arrived at Mauthausen late—January 30, 1945—after evacuation from Auschwitz, and they show up only mixed into the larger mass of prisoners in the nummerbucher; the zugangsbucher cut off on January 23 or 24, probably because the camp is overwhelmed by newcomers. Nor can I follow the Kovno boys from Mauthausen to the auskommando built in March at Gunskirchen, where Americans liberated many in early May.

Thus, my sense is that social history work in the ITS concentration camp records carries the richest possibilities in Buchenwald, where transport lists, zugangsbucher, blockbucher, and digitized prisoner materials can be linked. In Dachau and Mauthausen, there is not the same range of materials, they cut off earlier, and they are more difficult to link as well. On Bergen Belsen and several other camps, forget about it. Yet Buchenwald was the main camp in the concentration camp system, and huge numbers moved through and out of it. It is the Grand Central Station and affords a view of prisoners being moved around, deposited, quarantined, then moved out again. 

All this sharpens my sense of what was happening as numerous transports came to Buchenwald in 1944–45 from factory labor camps and death and slave labor camps in Poland, many containing many children and youths. The boys appear on the transport lists; they can be followed into the clustered barracks into which underground prisoners moved them while temporarily keeping other prisoners and then sending them to auskommandos around central Germany. The boys were clustered in barrack 8 for a time, then after mid-summer 1944, they were clustered in barrack 23. In early 1945, they were picked off the transports and placed again in block 8; and then, when the transports came in larger numbers from Auschwitz and Gross Rosen, they were placed in huge numbers in a new block 66, down the hill. The prisoner materials in ITS, now also digitized, contain materials specifying arrival dates tied to transport lists and block assignments. The block cards say blocks 8 and 66 for most children and youths again and again. Elie Wiesel’s block card says he was moved to block 66.

Yesterday I found out who mentored little 8 year-old Israel Meir Lau (Lolek) in block 8 in the main camp. Lau’s memoir states it was Fyodor from Rostow but fails to mention his last name. I looked at all the Fyodors and think it is Fyodor Michajlitschenko, an 18-year old prisoner arrested by the Gestapo in 1943. He made ear warmers for the boy and watched over him like a father. I also found out about the Gypsy boy the same age in block 8, Josef Berger, from Aachen Holland, who nearly alone among the Gypsy youths brought to Buchenwald, was saved from being sent back to the gas at Auschwitz. Many boys were entertained in block 8 by Jakow Nikiforow, a former circus artist recently from Novosobirsk. I found his materials and other information about other members of the prisoner conspiracy. Later today I will work mainly on my own research.

I skipped the walking tour of Bad Arolsen provided by a local guide last night. It turned out to be a lot of stuff about the local castle and main town streets, but my colleagues were disturbed by the historical bracketing that went on around the local leadership. It turns out that the duke of the castle was the biggest Nazi in the district and was prosecuted after the war in the Allied trials held at Dachau. He was guilty as hell. It also turned out that he named Heinrich Himmler as his son’s godfather. That’s the current duke who lives in the castle at Bad Arolsen. 

On Sunday, after two personal work days in the archive, we’re heading to Bergen Belsen, where a new museum opened this year. Interestingly, because the camp was ravaged by typhus and the British set flame to it after liberation, there are not the kinds of materials here at ITS that there are from several other camps. Nor are there many original materials on the ghettos. I looked at holdings yesterday on Warsaw, Lodz, and Kovno.

June 19, 2008

We’re beginning to see some of the potential of the ITS collection for new work on the concentration camps, their development, shift in size and function during war and empire, and the ways they used and treated prisoners. We’re also beginning to see some potential in the materials here for specialized work on practical day-to-day life in the camps, including the migration histories and demography of the prisoners. 

Yet we’re also seeing drawbacks – the unevenness of ITS holdings by camp, also the unevenness of materials themselves, some original, lots copied or microfilmed. Basically, we are also realizing ITS is organized to generate information about individuals, not topics and subjects, and not to provide professional services now being contemplated. We are also discovering an institutional culture where knowledge is specialized and implicit, and must be made explicit. How locate things? The finding knowledge and experience of the staff must be harnessed. How help transform an organization, and at the same time recapture and repurpose its expertise? 

Our colleagues think that the forced labor records, also organized by individual names, can potentially be cross-organized by town or place and by company. Lots of forced laborers worked for German firms in specific towns, and this history is not fully known or developed. Our colleagues also think the post-war materials about displaced persons organized by region can be a treasure trove for work on post-war migration. Those working on ITS administration think there is a history there to be tapped. My own group is still thinking about the camps. Some camps like Buchenwald and maybe Mauthaussen or Dachau are richly represented; but some are not, like Bergen Belsen or Auschwitz. This limits possibilities for doing comparative history. 

Reito Meister, the Swiss director of the ITS, spoke with us yesterday afternoon and asked us to help tap ITS’ potential as a possible archive, to help think about investments that must be made and things that must be done. Everyone realizes some materials are in rough shape in non-climate controlled rooms, sometimes laminated or held together by rusting clips. There is a reclamation project that must be embraced. 

Yet the stuff here is rich and we all keep finding powerful materials. This is the talk of the dinner or breakfast table. Yesterday staff assisted me to find a list of the 131 boys from Kovno, Lithuania, who on July 26, 1944 –after having been taken to Landsberg, a sub-camp of Dachau -- were sent by the Nazis from Dachau to Auschwitz-Birkenau to be killed. Only they did not die but instead were integrated into the camp. A large minority subsequently survived selections and, in 1945, many boys were evacuated to Buchenwald or Mauthausen. The list has the boys’ names, town of origin, and individual birth dates. About ten wound up among the boys assisted by the Buchenwald underground. 

June 18, 2008

Yesterday my team members began working with the incarceration collections during World War II. The collection holds information on Gestapo activities and prisons, on a range of concentration camps and prisoners, and on some death camps. It includes envelopes for prisoners with elaborate information, including their personal cards and histories and postwar military interviews. There are transport lists to and from the camps and to other camps, which include information on birth dates, towns of origin and nationality of the prisoners, zugangsbucher (arrival books), with arrival dates and block assignments, and blockbucher (block books), recording where prisoners were bunked or transferred and where they were sent for slave labor. It is a first introduction to the enormous Nazi system of camps, the bureaucratic routines and terror-filled aspects of life there, and what happened to the mass of prisoners in the system.

We split up to try to get an overview of what’s in the enormous collection and what its uses might be. Elissa Maelander-Koslov, who is interested in exploring the practical aspects of Nazi terror, looked at Gestapo documents and the prisons in Nazi Germany. Jessica Anderson Hughes looked at some of the camps near Berlin, starting with Ravensbruck, the women’s camp, and hoping to move to Sachsenhausen. Alexander Doulout looked at the French transit camps, ante-rooms for the French Jews and for French prisoners into the Nazi system. I started with Buchenwald, like Jessica examining prisoner envelopes, then seeing if transport lists, zugangsbucher, and blockbucher could be linked to follow what happened to people from similar towns, children and youths, and those arriving at specific times in the camp.

There is a literature on the Nazi concentration camps that views each camp as “a world apart,” set off from the universe outside the gate, part of a separate “concentrationary universe,” and which sees in the Nazi camp the most absolute form of terror, indeed a new “order of terror” beyond anything before. In this portrait, the Nazi camp was a regime of absolute power and prisoners were a coerced and seriated mass, their bodies and selves completely transformed by humiliation and persistent terror, and their existence reduced to an horizon-less present and an all against all war for survival. I think many of us want to test and probe the materials to see whether this useful portrait goes too far, suppressing key differences among different camps and underestimating prisoner abilities, within narrow limits, to exert modest agency even in the camps. We are interested in the ability of prisoners to size up their situation, use information, and adapt adjustment strategies to Nazi terror. 

Above all, we are worried at the size and ambition of what we have to do and the little time to do it. An added layer is learning the new computer-based search system for the materials in the collection already digitized and now at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. I practiced on the system yesterday, looking for information on the three youngest children at Buchenwald – Janek Szlajfstajn and Stefan Jerzy Zweig, who were three years old, then four just before liberation, and Idele Henechowicz, who was two and a half years old and three at liberation at Bergen Belsen. I also spotted the beginnings of the child rescue operation at Buchenwald aimed at Jewish children and youths when, in August 1944, as a large number of youths arrived from the Hasag munitions operation at Skarzysko Kamiena, they were selected out of the flow of prisoners and clustered in a new Jewish block in the main camp, block 23, at the same time most prisoners were marked SB for “special handling” and were moved to brutal slave commandos at Schlieben, Schwalbe, Niederohschul, Wille (Troglitz) and elsewhere.

Later today, we’ll be back into the primary materials, still trying to get an overview of what’s there and how what’s present might be used in the future. What more do we wish to know about these places of terror and about the responses by human beings to conditions of terror and tyranny? We’ll also be meeting briefly and sharing preliminary insights with our hosts about the potential of and problems with the collection.

June 17, 2008

For more than sixty years, the Red Cross International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen has been a “tracing service.” ITS staff has drawn on concentration camp records, forced labor records, and postwar displaced persons records deposited by the Allies after World War II to trace individuals and develop information responsive to requests made by survivors and their families. Scholars have not had access to the former Nazi records.

All this is changing, as ITS transforms itself into an archive. Its leadership seeks to know from a group of visiting scholars sponsored by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum what uses we might make as new clients of the collections here, what opportunities for new research into Nazi activities, the Holocaust, and the experiences of victims they might offer, and what sorts of finding aids and priorities in developing these and what new investments should be considered to make the materials known and accessible.

This is quite challenging. Dr. Irmatrud Wojak, formerly of the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt, a fine historian and the new scientific director of ITS, welcomed us yesterday, and shared with us the challenges she and her colleagues are facing. Udo Jost, the longtime archivist at ITS, showed us around parts of the collection in this beautiful spa town in the rolling mountains of east Hesse. The holdings are immense, sprawling, covering 27,000 meters and numerous floors in several buildings. We saw examples of the 50 million different pieces of evidence on more than 17.5 million people during our first day – Nazi camp records, postwar Allied military records, records on the survivors and displaced persons, and more. We met some of the 300 staff.

Among our visiting group is Konrad Kwiet, Holocaust historian from the University of Sydney and the chief historian of the Australian War Crimes Commission, Susan Slyomovics, anthropologist from UCLA and daughter of Holocaust survivors, Jean-Marc Dreyfus, historian, from Paris and the University of Manchester, and Elissa Maelander-Koslov, an Italian and an anthropologist from the University of Erfurt. We’re assisted by some historians and staff from the Holocaust museum.

For some scholars, the interest is personal. Susan Slyomovics’ grandmother and mother were together in Auschwitz-Birkenau and then in a sub-camp of Buchenwald near Leipzig called Markleesburg. Idit Gil, of Israel’s Open University, is tracking a transport that took her father’s brother from Auschwitz-Birkenau to his death between Stuttgart and Bizenow in Germany near the end of the war. Alexandre Doulout is writing the history of deportation of his small town in the southwest of France.

For others, we’re already at work on projects that enable us to help ITS test the capacity of the holdings to answer questions scholars may have. Kwiet is tracking women who were held at Auschwitz. Eric Steinhardt from the University of North Carolina is exploring the role played by East European Volksdeutch in Nazi activities. I’m interested in the rescue of children and youths at Buchenwald by elements of the German Communist-led international camp resistance. Yesterday, I spotted the boxes of materials that staff has set aside for me to look through later this week.

Our scholars are organized into four work teams corresponding with the ITS collection, and next week we will present our thoughts and insights to the ITS and to an audience of the international press. I am on the concentration camp records team and today we will begin to explore camp records – lists, books, files of materials on millions of individuals. It is a little overwhelming at this stage, daunting, and difficult. 

Our task is to help ITS transform from an organization that develops information on individuals, which underwrites what might be termed genealogy and biography, into an organization that works with scholars asking questions which produce history, sociology, and anthropology. From individuals and families and particular places, the interest is now shifting to generalization about lots of individuals and families and many places. History and its allied subjects focus on collectivities of people and on events in many places and across time. It is our challenge to learn quickly about what’s here and be as thoughtful and helpful to our hosts as possible. In that spirit, ITS wined and dined us last night. Later this morning, we go to work.