"The documentation of forced and slave labor reveals the workings of the system at ground level, and the horrendous consequences of seeing human beings as mere ‘assets’”
For the last few years, Paul Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, has helped lead a campaign to make documents of the International Tracing Service (ITS) available to the public. Created by the Allies in 1943 to help repatriate people displaced by World War II, ITS grew into an immense archive of materials from Gestapo offices, prisons, and police stations. During the last half-century, many other institutions and individuals also contributed documents to it. These records—50 million pages on sixteen miles of shelves in six buildings in the small German town of Bad Arolsen—detail the fates of all 17.5 million Holocaust victims, including forced and slave laborers, and displaced persons (DPs) of many ethnic groups.
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As the United States’ ITS depository, the museum made the first batch of documentation available in January. While survivors and families seek closure, scholars can use the data to follow the money through the Axis war machine into the pockets of collaborators—individual, corporate, or government. This is among the reasons the eleven signatories of the 1955 Berne Treaty governing ITS were loath to open it. Shapiro recounts how and why that changed.
Why has it taken so long to open ITS?
A combination of factors. The Allies’ principal goal initially was to reunite families and send people home. Later, the documentation relating to forced laborers was used to underpin requests for pensions from the German government and, in this decade, to provide compensation for forced and slave laborers who could document their history. The institution was very much focused on those specific tasks. Simultaneously, for a long time there were not major institutions, aside from those in Israel, dedicated to Holocaust study, so demand on ITS was not very great. When it increased over the last twenty years—in part because of the U.S. Holocaust Museum—there was a different problem: the ITS management and governing structure made it almost impossible to get action.
How?
Eleven governments sit on the International Commission for ITS. They determined that any change in the operation required unanimity, which was very difficult to achieve. And in fact the management of ITS, for a period of time, worked hard to make sure it wouldn’t be achieved. The International Committee of the Red Cross was contracted in 1955 to run the place, which it did for fifty years with no controversy and no change. When change appeared, the Red Cross was not quick to embrace it. Over two decades, leadership on-site at ITS was opposed to opening the archive for research and providing survivors with documents relating to them, and opposed to sharing the documentation. Add a fourth piece: the German government ministry responsible for funding ITS as part of the postwar settlement was opposed. So you had to get all those players to agree to bring about change, and any one player could generate enough opposition so that nothing happened for years.
And many opposed change.
Every country had a reason not to have this at the top of their agenda. German chancellor Gerhard Schröder had a policy called Schlussstrich, which means drawing a line under the Holocaust: this is the past, now we move on. Now, no country has done as much as Germany to address Holocaust issues head-on. But you don’t draw a line under the past by making 50 million documents about it available. The United States was reluctant to enter a situation where the German government, one of our most important friends and allies, was making it very clear they were opposed. Israel has a very close relationship with Germany; in the 1950s, Yad Vashem was able to copy some ITS documentation. They believed they had copied everything, and felt nothing would be achieved by taking on such a sensitive issue. So Israel, though not opposed, was silent. The German position changed more recently with the Merkel chancellorship, but Italy was one of the most recalcitrant. In the 1980s Italy deposited a lot of material from the DP camps in ITS. Why would that be sensitive? First, to some extent people deposited documentation there because they thought it would never be seen. Second, we know today that Italian DP camps were a way for war criminals to make their way out of Europe.
And there was the money trail.
The documentation of forced and slave labor reveals the workings of the system at ground level, and the horrendous consequences of seeing human beings as mere “assets.” It shows how money moved between government, industry, the SS,
and other consumers of human beings. In some regions, every company, every organization—governmental, do-gooder, ecclesiastical—used forced and slave labor. It was a cheap, almost cost-free resource, and if you wasted it you weren’t going be held accountable. You can also see how Allied forces dealt with the survivors; prejudice didn’t end when the Nazi regime fell.
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