Located in Bad Arolsen, Germany, the International Tracing Service (ITS) is a centre for documentation, research, and information on Nazi persecution, forced labour, and the Holocaust. With more than 30 million documents it is the world’s biggest archive on this subject. Founded on British initiative its roots reach back to 1943. Today the ITS operates under supervision of an international commission with representatives from 11 countries. Since 2013, its archive is included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World programme, an international initiative to safeguard humanity’s documentary heritage. See Brown-Fleming, S., <a href" http://wiener.soutron.net/Portal/Default/en-GB/RecordView/Index/9018">Nazi Persecution and Postwar Repercussions: The International Tracing Service Archive and Holocaust Research, Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield, 2016.
[In December 2011, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office deposited the UK's digital copy of the International Tracing Service Archive at The Wiener Library., This website provides information on terms and conditions of access to the ITS archive at The Wiener Library.]
This material has been digitised. Readers should book a reading room terminal to access it.
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Beside the ITS and the Allied High Commission (HICOG) respectively this bundle comprises several other correspondents including journalists, the World Jewish Congress, the War Documentation Project at Columbia University, the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt am Main, and the Dutch Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie. The correspondence centres on HICOG’s arrangements for a takeover of ITS by West German authorities. The various correspondents emphasize their reservations on such an agreement and discuss alternative solutions. Aside from that light is thrown on the cooperation and mutual research assistance between ITS and The Wiener Library including the exchange of documents as well as a research stay at the ITS. Contained are a draft of an agreement on a German takeover of ITS, a press cutting, a copy of an article from the Jewish Telegraph Agency, memos by K. Baum and by Paul W. Freedman, and a timetable of a trip of Alfred Wiener to West Germany that included a visit of the ITS.
Correspondence with International Tracing Service (ITS)