Bad Arolsen Archive May Reveal Much About Third Reich Sponsors

By Mark Hoerrner

Imagine being able to delve deep into the files of the FBI or CIA, back to when the agencies were created and viewing history through the tales recorded in thousands of classified documents never before seen by the public. A very similar situation has been created as a result of the opening of the files of the International Tracing Service which currently controls hundreds of thousands of records about the Holocaust.

Since the end of World War II, the International Committee for the Red Cross has had in operation a division called the International Tracing Service, an arm dedicated to helping families trace the fate of lost relatives during the Holocaust. The records have always been closely guarded, but the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has been one of the organizations leading the charge to have the massive archive of files opened.

"Certainly, access to the miles of International Tracing Service files will dramatically expand the scope of Holocaust research," says Edwin Black, author of IBM and the Holocaust, in the Jewish Daily Forward. "Because the tracing service had previously focused only on individual victims, it never assembled the larger picture of which companies or German organizations were involved in Hitler’s industrial scale oppression and genocide. That is now possible."

The U.S., along with the other 10 member nations of the ICRC, challenged the Red Cross to release the archive, stating that it’s mission of assisting family members was concluded and that the files should be made public.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the German government objected to the release of the files based on fears that after already disbursing more than $80 billion in reparations it might face new legal challenges that could possibly bankrupt the country.

Black reports that the archive, located in Bad Arolsen, Germany, contains more than 33 million pages of documentation, of which more than half has been accessible through digital records. The records are divided into four sections. He notes that this was made possible with support from the computer giant, IBM, which aided the Nazis in managing files on prisoners.

The files are likely to reveal other Nazi collaborators in the U.S., Black writes, including mega-corporations General Motors, Chase Manhattan Bank, Ford, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Institution. The discovery of the corporate information that may come out of the archives is why Black believes the files may be better handled by an organization other than the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

"Given that corporate involvement is precisely the type of information that would be abundantly documented in International Tracing Service files," Black writes, "There is strong reason to doubt the Holocaust museum’s trustworthiness as steward of the archive’s files."