Holocaust Archives finally being opened

First, let me apologize for letting Doolittle's go so long without a post. Explanations really aren't worth the digital ink.

OK, for those who do no know me, I'm a professional Records Manager by trade. I've had the honor and joy of touring and working with some of the great archives of the U.S. including the Library of Congress, National Archives, Boston Public Library, and the Smithsonian. Maybe it was these organizations' zeal to make their collections relevant and accessible that made me all the more surprised by this story.

The International Red Cross has been managing the archives of the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen since the end of WWII. This repository contains "files on more than 17 million people who passed through the concentration camps and forced labor camps of the Third Reich, as well as the displaced persons camps that sprang up across Europe after the war." Sounds like a great resource for historians, genealogists, and those who just want to know what happened to friends and relatives who were subjected to this system of camps.

Apparently, attempts to access this information have been effectively stymied by a combination of bureaucratic inertia (the archives are under the jurisdiction of eleven nations), eccentric management, and little to no technological or monetary investment. Now, finally, the information is being digitised (an expected total of 7 terabytes) to be made available to the member nations.

Each country will have to handle the information according to their own privacy rules. In addition, the original hard copies will only be available to family members of those mentioned within them (in order to protect the physical items). But even with these limitations, this will be a huge boon to survivors and their families as well as researchers and historians.

The fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of massive archives in Russia has allowed for new popular and scholarly examinations of the Soviet Gulag. The opening of the ITS archives holds the promise of similar new research not just on the Holocaust, but also on Nazi labor camps, population transfers, and even Nazi rat-line networks such as the infamous ODESSA group.

This release may also help quiet Holocaust deniers. To paraphrase the Supreme Court, the solution to bad information is always more information, not less.