Ep. 28- The International Tracing Service with Dan Stone

In addition  to the massive loss of life, the twelve years of Nazi rule in Europe created one of the largest demographic disasters in human history with millions of people scattered across the continent.  For Holocaust survivors, one of the most pressing tasks after liberation was attempting to discover the fates of relatives and friends.  A variety of international organizations worked to help these people,  This also resulted in one of the most interesting archives: the archives of the International Tracing Service.

In this episode, I talk with Dan Stone about the search for the missing, the challenges of documenting the Holocaust, the secretive political history of the search for survivors.

Stone, Dan.  Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust (2023)

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Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.5)
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waitman Bourne. And today we're going to talk about what happens after the Holocaust or rather, arguably what happens during sort of the later phases of the Holocaust. Because I think it's fair to say that one way of looking at the Holocaust is that it doesn't just end in 1945 with liberation of the camps. Europe is in a state of just massive

flux and movement of peoples. And for many people, there are attempts to recover their friends, their family and their life before. And so today we're going to talk with historian Dan Stone about one of the organizations that was involved in this process of trying to account for, keep track of, manage at times help this group of people that is moving through Europe.

and around Europe after the end of World War II. And I'm going to let Dan talk more about that. But Dan, welcome to the podcast.

Dan Stone (01:08.026)
Thank very much. Thank you for having me.

Waitman Beorn (01:10.036)
Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to this particular topic?

Dan Stone (01:17.53)
Sure, I've been working on the history of the Holocaust for, I guess, 30 years since I was a graduate student and I've been working at Royal Holloway, University of London for the last 25 years. I've worked on lots of projects mainly related to the Holocaust, but also on genocide more broadly, on the history of various ideas that feed into genocide and fascism, things like eugenics, history of anthropology.

race thinking, fascism and so on. This particular project came about because we'll talk about this, I think the history of the institution, but when the ITS opened up to the public, the countries that are members of the international commission that is the legal owner of ITS were entitled to a digital copy. And my former colleague, David Cesarani was involved in negotiating with the home office here in the UK.

to bring a copy of the digital database to the UK. It's now based at the Vena Holocaust Library in London. And having done that, he then said to me, you should have a look at this ITS. It's interesting. And I was like, yeah, okay, I'll go and have a look. And the ITS officer who'd been newly appointed at the Vena Library at the time, Christine Schmidt, showed me how to use

the database, or at least tried to, it's extraordinarily complicated as I think we'll discuss as well. And it was immediately apparent to me that this was a phenomenal database with an extraordinary amount of stuff in it. on the first one or two occasions that I used it, I barely scratched the surface. But as part of the process of opening up the ITS to scholars and to the world more generally, the

cooperated with various other institutions, including the Wiener Library, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, to run a series of workshops and conferences and so on to encourage scholars to use ITS. And so I was involved in several of those conferences and so on. And so my first foray into ITS was looking at a little known sub camp of Gross Rosen called Christianstadt, which

Dan Stone (03:45.442)
a small women's sub camp in what's now a quite remote part of Western Poland and looking at how the women in the camp survived and what the conditions in that camp were. And what was immediately apparent to me was that the ITS documents on their own are rarely sufficient to write a history of any one particular thing, whether that's a labor camp or a prison or a death march, whatever it happens to be.

but that when used together with other sources, they provide a way into writing a very rich and detailed account of certain particular things. I think this is also something we'll discuss. You can't write a history of the Holocaust as such, a kind of grand synthetic history of the Holocaust solely on the basis of the ITS sources, but it can certainly enrich the accounts that we do give. And in some cases, it does provide

discrete histories of particular phenomena that might otherwise be very difficult to write about.

Waitman Beorn (04:50.184)
Yeah, I mean, and one of the things that's really cool, by the way, for listeners is that the ITS is available for everybody. know, if you are interested and if you're listening to this podcast and you're interested, you can literally go to the ITS. And I mean, it's not always it's not always intuitive from the beginning, but even for someone who doesn't really know how to use it, you can put in, you know, any camp or something and just you'll see historical documents.

they'll go right to your screen and you can see them and it's something you can play with and go in and just sort of look around, which is really cool. But before we get to the international tracing, sorry, go

Dan Stone (05:24.804)
would say about that. Let me know. I just wanted to say that if you go to the website, which is the institution is now called the Arrowson archives. So you have to go to the Arrowson archives website. The what's online is not the full database. So there are millions of documents available online on the website and it is searchable. It's it's not simple or straightforward. And there are some very helpful guides to doing your search that are on the website.

But it's always worth remembering that what's there online is not the full database. if you're looking, let's say if you're looking for a relative, it's worth getting in touch with the people at the Vena library, or if you're listening in the states, the people at USHMM in DC to ask for help with the search.

Waitman Beorn (06:16.07)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's a great point. And I was just suggesting if you're if you just kind of want to see what kinds of documents are in there, you know, can just put in something like a big a big overall phrase and sort of see what comes up. But that's a great point. And it's worth it's something that I'm sure we'll talk about later. You know what the experts, the people that work with us every day at the Viener Library and at the Holocaust Museum in D .C.

Dan Stone (06:25.529)
Yeah, for sure.

Waitman Beorn (06:43.508)
You know, if, you have a connection and a family connection or something, they can often really drill down into lots of different ways and really be helpful. So do do that. Um, but before we talk about the international tracing service, maybe we should just set the scene. kind of set it a little bit, but, um, the idea of, of Europe in the immediate aftermath of World War II, just awash with people who aren't where they were supposed to be, or rather aren't where they sort of started out in 1939. And then how that, how that leads to the,

the creation, I suppose, of the ITS.

Dan Stone (07:16.634)
The two are obviously strongly connected. So as you've said, I Europe is in a state of chaos. mean, whole cities destroyed, armies on the march, and the allies are kind of prepared for this. But at the same time, they, I think, don't anticipate the scale of what they discover, which is to say that in Germany, at the end of the war, there are about 7 million people who are classified as displaced persons. That's to say,

non -German nationals who are on German territory at the end of the war. And that's not the whole story, obviously. There are also, in the immediate aftermath of the war, something up to 12 or 13 million ethnic Germans who are being expelled from their homelands east of the new borders of Germany, from Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, et cetera. And there

Of course people all across Europe who are now homeless looking for somewhere to live and desperately trying to find relatives so one of the things that is imperative from the Allies point to you from a military perspective is that while the war is going on and in its immediate aftermath they want control of the roads basically they want armies to be able to move easily and so the the treatment of DPs is on the one hand driven by

quite clear humanitarian motives to help these people. On the other hand, the orders that are given to repatriate people as soon as possible and to assemble people in so -called assembly centers, which then get called DP camps, is also about keeping them off the road and stopping them from interfering with the military's business. In this they're pretty successful on the whole, but one of the things that we'll talk about, I think, is the fact that for

Holocaust survivors in particular, people who are aware of the fact that they are in many cases the sole survivors of their families or their communities, the desperate need to find loved ones is something that trumps all their other needs. So these are people who are often ill physically and psychologically, they're starving, they're desperate to find somewhere to live, they need the support and help of the allies. But at the same time, the merest mention

Dan Stone (09:38.958)
the possibility that a relative has survived somewhere, these are people who will trek across Europe at the drop of a hat. How they do that is extraordinary because the allies impose measures to prevent people from moving. And if you read, for example, accounts by charity workers, you know, they need to have permits just to move from one city to another. And yet somehow some of these Holocaust survivors managed to travel across the whole of Europe from a DP camp in Germany to go back to Romania because they've heard that, you know, a relative might be alive.

and then come back again. And they do this at extreme cost to themselves. But it's a measure of the urgency for them of the situation that they're willing to try and do this.

Waitman Beorn (10:21.716)
And so, you know, what, how does the ITS come into being? Because one of the things that, and warning all of our listeners, there are lots of acronyms in this discussion. But, you know, how does it come into being and who's responsible for it and what is it? mean, because it's, right? And one of the things is that I think is often interesting for people that are not necessarily academic historians.

Dan Stone (10:32.042)
yes.

Waitman Beorn (10:50.366)
You know, now it's an archive, right? So we sort of think, this is just a, a, a lots of documents. but it's actually, you know, the documents are kind of the, the remnants of an organization of people that was doing things and the documents are not just there as records. They're, they are always there as something that are their tools that are being used by people to do certain things,

Dan Stone (11:15.938)
Yes, that's absolutely correct. the health warning now is that what follows is kind of alphabet soup of acronyms. I'll try and keep it manageable. Because this is a very difficult and complex question. Historians always like to find origins for things. And that's no less true for the ITS. The name International Tracing Service.

which describes, as you say, not an archive, but a tracing service, an actual institution that is involved in helping people find their loved ones and helping survivors connect with their relatives elsewhere. And to clarify the fates of people who are missing at the end of the war is a name that was first used in the summer of 1947. And the institution known as the International Tracing Service then started operating under that name from January 1948.

But there is a prehistory that goes back some five years before that. There are debates among historians of the ITS as to precisely where the origins lie. And I think we can't really find them in a very neat way. I will say only that there are different organizations involved that feed into what becomes the ITS. So according to Maurice Tudicum, who is the Swiss humanitarian

who became the first director of ITS in 1948, who wrote a history of the institution. He says that the origins of post -war tracing lie in a decision of the Inter -Allied Post -War Requirement Bureau's Committee on Displaced Persons, a body that had been set up in 1941, their decision of 1943 to set up plans for national tracing bureaus and for a central tracing bureau.

And they did this in cooperation with institutions such as the British Red Cross Committee, society rather, because it was felt that the ICRC, the International Committee on the Red Cross, had the necessary tools to run a tracing service. It had done so since the late 19th century, had done so very successfully during the First World War. And so it would seem obvious that the Red Cross would

Dan Stone (13:33.844)
body that would run a tracing service. At the same time however as this London -based post -war requirements bureau was discussing the need for a tracing service, the G5 division, that's the civilian affairs division, division of SHAEF, the supreme headquarters allied expeditionary forces, was also discussing the need for a tracing service. Again that means in the context of

That means the military, right? So the military were aware, as I said already, that there were lots of people on the move in Europe and they needed to find a way of keeping them under control and at the same time of helping them. You see both imperatives at work in the military documents. And so it's not clear which of these bodies feeds through initially, but what happens is that the military win out.

So one of the things that I describe in my book is in the early years of ITS, I'm going to use the term ITS anachronistically now to describe this whole institution because it's easier. But one of the things that happens in the first few years from like, let's say 1943 to 1948 is that the Red Cross gradually gets excluded from the process of running ITS. Even though they seem to be the natural organization to do so, the problem,

is that from the allies perspective, they want this to be a body that helps non -German nationals. it's not, this is to help so -called United Nationals. The UN has just been set up. They do not want this to be a tracing service for Germans and for German collaborators, Axis Nationals. And the Red Cross, of course, has a neutral international humanitarian remit. And so helping one group of people and not another would be against its international remit.

The military also wanted to keep control of this for its own benefit so that they knew what was happening. So in the end, what happens is that the much to the chagrin of Sydney, Janetta Warner, is effectively, she's in a position of, let's say the equivalent of the foreign officer for the British Red Cross Society. She's furious about this. complains bitterly about the fact that the Red Cross is the only.

Dan Stone (15:58.138)
organization that has the skills necessary to run such a tracing service, but the military basically say sorry we're taking over. And so in 1944 UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which is under the control of of Schaef and the Allied Control Authority, is basically tasked with setting up a tracing and location unit as it's first called, which they do in Versailles. So as the Allies

as the western allies push eastwards the tracing service is first set up in Versailles and then as the allies push into Germany it's moved to Hoekst which is a suburb of Frankfurt and Mainz and then later in 1946 it's moved to Arlesen which is in the center of Germany in in Hesse in the American zone but conveniently close to the borders of the British and the Soviet zones as well and the town was chosen for its strategic location

because of the fact that it was not heavily bombed during the war and that there were buildings there that could house this archive. From that point onwards, Central Tracing Bureau, as it is then called, is run by UNRWA. But UNRWA itself has a short lifespan. And so within a couple of years, there are debates about what will happen once UNRWA is dissolved. And so in 1947,

Again, the Red Cross tries to muscle in on the act, but again, the Allies refuse. And so after some deliberation, the organization is then handed over to the International Refugee Organization or the IRO. And that's significant at this point, that's in summer of 1947. And that's significant because the IRO is unlike UNRWA is only a creature of the Western Allies.

UNRWA was a quadripartite organization, including the Soviets. But the IRO takes over in 1947, and it's tasked with not simply repatriating DPs, but also resettling in a third country those DPs who have not yet been repatriated. And this infuriates the Soviets because they say, well, this breaks the terms of the treaties we agreed at Yalta and Potsdam, i .e. to return Soviet citizens to the Soviet Union.

Dan Stone (18:22.542)
because there are large numbers of, there still about a million DPs who are unwilling to be returned to their countries of origin, including large numbers of Eastern European Jews, but also large numbers of non -Jewish Ukrainians, Bolts and Poles who are refusing to go back to regions that are now under Soviet control. Sometimes because they have dubious pasts as collaborators with the Third Reich, but sometimes simply because they don't want to go back to

places that are now under communist control. And so the Cold War comes to Arrolson and to the ITS and the ITS becomes a kind of tool of Cold War politics as well with respect to the tracing that it undertakes as well. We'll talk about that later, I think. So the IRO runs the International Tracing Service as it is set up in 1948. The IRO's mandate expires also in 1950. And so in 1951,

the transfer is controlled to High Cog, which is the High Commission for Occupied Germany. And it's only in 1955, so 10 years after the end of the war, when the Cold War has kind of settled down into the familiar stalemate across Europe, that the Allies finally agree that they no longer need to be in control of this institution and it's handed over to the International Committee of the Red Cross. And from 1955 until 2008,

ICRC administers the Red Cross, excuse me, administers the ITS with all sorts of consequences for that body which we can talk about. But what's crucial, this institutional history is very complicated, I try and set it out in a reasonably accessible way in the book, what's crucial is exactly as you say, this is not an archive in the

and it's still not solely an archive, it's a tracing service and it still exists as a tracing service so you can write to the relevant colleagues at the Viena library or the Holocaust Museum in DC and ask for assistance with tracing people missing from World War II. And in Arrowson itself, the Arrowson archives still also perform this function. And so the documents that are in the International Tracing Service were not collected with

Dan Stone (20:44.504)
with the aim of creating an archive that would be useful for historians of the Holocaust. These were documents that were collected with the aim of facilitating the tracing process. So the documents were not read by the people who worked at ITS with the aim of writing histories. They were read with the intention of extracting names from them. So the centerpiece of the ITS archive is the so -called central name index. So in physical hard copy,

It's a literally a card index of 17 and a half million people's names. It's extraordinary to see it. It's vast, vast collection of cards arranged in what's called an alphabetical phonetic order. Because of course, especially with Eastern European names, are often many, many ways of spelling the same name. And it's very complicated to when a tracing request comes in to make sure you're talking about the right person and the same person, especially with common names like Maya.

or Kuznetsov, are hundreds, if you do a search on the website, you'll see there are hundreds, sometimes many hundreds of people with the same name. And so of course, relatives want to know that the answers they're getting deal with the correct person. And so the documents were read so that these names could be in the ITS jargon carded. And then on the central name index card, there are references, numerical references.

to other documents in the collection so that the tracers could then cross -reference those documents and go to them to find where that name appears. And this is the origins of the tracing process as it was carried out from its inception. I'm sorry, that's a very long and complicated answer.

Waitman Beorn (22:28.564)
And, and, and, no, that that's really good though. And I think if that's kind of how it still works today, right? Cause if you put a name in, oftentimes the results that come out are this collection, page 25, this different collection, this different collection. So it's still kind of, you know, if you put a name in, it's still kind of functions in this, in this kind of way.

Dan Stone (22:50.546)
Mm That's exactly that's exactly how it functions. It will it will bring up this it will bring up the central name index card and then it will bring up other documents in which the name of the person appears. Exactly so.

Waitman Beorn (23:03.252)
And so how does this work? what is, mean, again, because one of the really interesting things I've used ITS a little bit, but clearly not as much as you have or some other people. But what's really interesting about it is that you'll put in something from my UNOVSKA book. I put in a name or I put in UNOVSKA and you get lots of really interesting documents, but they're from all kinds of different organizations and origins, which gets back to what we talking about earlier, that this is not a sort of

It's not the records created by one organization to sort of account for people. It's literally an amalgamation of documents from lots of different time periods, from lots of different other organizations who are creating documents for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they are historical documents for the Nazis themselves. Sometimes they are, you know, a post -war testimony or someone or someone else trying to find that person, et cetera, et cetera.

How is this used or how are people using this in the immediate post -war period? Or maybe even better, how are people generating these documents? And what are some of the stories of how people are trying to find each other via, again, anachronistically, the ITS or the precursor organizations to

Dan Stone (24:20.382)
Okay, there's a lot of questions there. I'll try and I'll try and do it in a chronological order that makes sense, I suppose. So the first thing is that, as you say, this is a grab bag of documents. It wasn't an archive established for historical research, as I've said. So the people involved in setting up what became ITS,

Waitman Beorn (24:23.036)
Yeah, sorry. That was a lot. one.

Dan Stone (24:49.728)
simply put their hands on any documents of relevance they could find that would help them tracing to trace people. So this meant as the allies captured various organizations and institutions they would capture records. allies at the same time, I'm not talking about some of the famous records so if you think about

You know the the Foreign Office files of the Third Reich for example that were captured by by the Americans. These are separate

collections of documents that were stored separately and have a different institutional history. But records, for example, relating to hospitals, insurance companies, orphanages, any place in Germany where people might appear, were the purview of ITS. And so they captured records along the way. They also issued orders. So for example, in the autumn of 1945,

the Allies issued an order to the new burgemeister, the mayors of all localities across Germany, to provide details of where United Nationals had been killed or died during the death marches in their localities. And because these were now new non -Nazi mayors, most of them complied, and these records are in ITS. So the International Tracing Service archives as a whole is the largest archive

relating to Nazi persecution. It contains over 30 million documents and I'm not embarrassed to tell you that I haven't read them all, right? I mean, it's beyond the scope of one person. Some of the documents in there are copied from other archives. So the history of ITS includes, as I I mentioned the Cold War already, but relations with tracing bureau or

Dan Stone (26:49.722)
former campsites like Auschwitz were complicated after 1948 but the many documents from Auschwitz were copied into ITS in the 1960s and other documents appeared in drips and drabs and still do to some to some small extent but for the most part the the bulk of the documents were there by 1950 or so and

Another place they're copied from is the the central office for the investigation of Nazi war crimes that sent Hale Steller in Ludwigsburg, which is the Office for investigating Nazi crimes that was set up in the post war period in Germany, many documents relating to judicial inquiries, trial transcripts and so on are copies from Ludwigsburg. But there are vast collections that are unique to ITS and these can be, I think, separated into different groups. Firstly,

wartime records that include many original runs of documents from concentration camps in Germany in the Reich proper. So huge amounts of documentation from Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Flossenburg, Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, not so much from Belsen because the Nazis destroyed many of the records there, but many of these camp records include things like registration lists, transfer lists, death lists,

documents relating to the political departments in those camps, the administration of the camps, huge amounts of documentation relating to the SS's use of slave labor, many records of firms that were using slave labor, a lot about the regular prison service in the Third Reich, all sorts of sites of incarceration, not just concentration camps that were run by the SS's

IKL, the inspectors of concentration camps, but by firms, local authorities, prisons, prison camps, and so on. There's not very much, there is some stuff, but not very much relating to the so -called Holocaust by bullets or the Holocaust in the East. This is mostly a collection of documents that relates to sites of incarceration in the Third Reich proper. And so that's a very important lacuna to bear in mind. If, you know, if somebody has a relative that

Dan Stone (29:11.962)
likely shot in a pit outside of a shtetl in the western soviet union their name is not going to appear in in it's but if you're looking for somebody let's say deported from vienna who might have been sent to auschwitz and then to a slave labor camp or the same from somewhere in hungary in 1944 then it's likely that their name will appear in in it's

So those those huge runs of wartime records, which are extraordinary, which also, as you say, contain things like post -war testimonies by survivors, records of various initiatives that were set up to speak to survivors. It also includes when we come to the post -war period, ITS is an amalgamation of many different tracing services. So in the immediate post -war period, there were lots of other smaller tracing services in existence.

So for example, the World Jewish Congress had a European tracing office. The American Joint Distribution Committee had a tracing office, quite a large one actually. And there were many smaller organizations, Catholic, Quaker, Jewish organizations, also trying to trace people. Most of these records ended up being folded into ITS after 1948 and they are searchable. And among the most remarkable of those

the records of the International Information Office, which was a tracing office set up by survivor inmates of Dachau at the end of the war. So many of the Dachau records were saved by inmates, prevented, hidden so that they didn't fall into the hands of the Nazis before they fled the camp, and were then used to facilitate tracing. People writing to Dachau while it was under American military administration in the post -war period would receive replies

from Ali Kucsi or Walter Czeslik who were the administrators of a former inmates of this tracing service and they are now searchable in in ITS. There's a huge pile of records relating to the DP camps relating to the IRO and migration so lots of lists of ships manifests, transport lists etc. Lots

Dan Stone (31:29.434)
excuse me, lists and material relating to, and these are particularly interesting, the so -called care and maintenance files produced by the International Refugee Organization, people having their appeals for help assessed by IRO officers, and there are appeals procedures. So sometimes people had their requests for assistance turned down, and then they could appeal. And we can read those appeals now in ITS. There are tens of thousands of

There's also one of the largest collections in ITS, over 3 million files are the so -called tracing and documentation or TD files. So every time since the ITS was established that somebody has submitted a request to trace a missing person, a file is opened on that person. And these, for the most part, these are very slim. They often have just one sheet on it with NF written on it, not found. And that's of course because

the history of the Holocaust is that survival was the exception, not the norm. And so for the most part, not found is the most common response that one sees in these files. But some of them are very fat indeed, and they contain documents written by the person themselves being looked for that might include IRO, care and maintenance files, applications for assistance, post -war testimonies,

concentration camp registration records, records of DP registration and so on and so forth. There are sometimes photographs, sometimes records written by relatives talking about the person that they're looking for. And these sometimes also go on for decades. They're very, very interesting. There are also decades, excuse me, there are files relating

works undertaken by ITS. So as you said, this was not just a tracing service. In the first five years of its existence, there was a difference between what the ITS called tracing and what it called searching. So tracing is the process of looking for missing people on the basis of documentation only. That's what, if you submit a request today to the ITS in Arrowson or in London or in DC, that's what will happen. The search officers will conduct

Dan Stone (33:57.523)
a tracing search on the basis of the documents. But in the first five years of its existence, the ITS also had a search operation whereby it sent people out into the field to look for documents and to look for people. So they had mass tracing, i .e. posters were put up across Europe with names of people on. There were broadcasts of names on the radio and in cinema newsreels and so on.

in the hope that people would hear a name and realize that a relative was alive. So then there lots of stories of this happening. And they also, they set up a process which was called identification of the unknown dead or graves recheck whereby, and for historians, this is an extraordinary boom. They sent people out into the fields to work with UNRRA to retrace the steps of the death marches. And so the first maps that we have of the death marches from

first months of 1945 come from this program that was initiated in the the autumn of 1945 that the maps are not perfect. Of course, historical research has shown that they're not always accurate, but they're nevertheless a remarkable resource for looking at where people died on route, where they were buried, how many corpses were disinterred, who could be identified. The ITS's role was the ITS did not have the legal

right to disinter bodies. That was the the military authorities only gave Unra the ability to do that but they had the they could follow on when this process was happening and then try and identify bodies which was very difficult to do didn't happen in many cases but nevertheless the records of those of the marches and the routes and the process of identification is really remarkable. We have also because of the the call to

to mayors in the autumn of 1945. We have lists of United Nationals who died on death marches. We also have cemetery maps, many from sketches through to extremely detailed architects plans of cemeteries all across Germany and Austria showing where foreign nationals died and where they were buried. So there's a huge range of documentation in ITS and perhaps

Dan Stone (36:22.714)
um will come to this but one of the most remarkable bodies that was set up was the the child search branch of of ITS because the allies knew that there would be some children amongst the DPs in 1945 but they were startled by the size the number of children that they discovered unaccompanied children I mean uh in in 1945 and so Unra had set up uh care teams to try and locate and identify these children

And in ITS, we find the records of thousands of unaccompanied children, both those who were being cared for by UNRWA and what happened to them in the years after the war, as well as requests from relatives for missing children. And again, in the first five years after the war, the ITS and UNRWA had teams that went out in Germany knocking on the doors of orphanages and foster homes and so on, trying to identify

non -German children. And this was a very difficult challenge, particularly with younger children who'd forgotten their mother tongues. And there were all sorts of, I write about this in the book, the ways in which these searchers who were themselves often DPs who could speak many languages, tried to find ways of working out whether or not a child was a German national or not. And some of the saddest, most difficult cases to read in the whole of the ITS collections are

concerning children and maybe we'll come back to

Waitman Beorn (37:56.318)
Well, I was going to say, because when you're, when you were talking about this, one of the images in the book is a, I think it's probably my book you're talking about is a, it's a telegram, written by a child who basically says, can you help tell me who I am to a, to a Greta Fisher, I believe is, is the, is that right? Is that, is that from a, from a child who was trying to figure out? Yeah.

Dan Stone (38:17.946)
That's absolutely correct. It is, but that's a very interesting case because you mentioned Greta Fisher. She's a well -known carer of children in the post -war period. She was one of the people who ran the Kloster -Indersdorf -Unra children's home, which was mostly but not solely caring for Jewish Holocaust survivors in the autumn of 1945.

And it's become quite well known because there've been several exhibitions in New York and in DC. And there are now some of these photos in the Holocaust galleries in the Imperial War Museum in London of the children in Kloster -Intersdorf holding name cards. You've probably seen some of these. And this was the idea of one of the teenagers in the care home itself that in order to help relatives find them,

should be photographed holding these cards with their names on and they're very powerful images. So Greta Fisher was one of the most renowned and obviously deeply caring women who helped to look after the children. The case that you mention was written by a boy, a teenage boy called Ludwig Gasparik in the summer and autumn of 1945 and he wrote

this American Red Cross note to Greta Fisher, which says on it, please help me write to CIC in Castle. I don't know nothing about me. And it's a heartrending case, but it turns out not to be what it seemed. we, one of the things you discover in reading the child search branch cases is first of all, it's unusual to have documents in the children's own voices.

That's a kind of holy grail of research into children trying to find out what the children themselves thought. Most of the time, the children's opinions are ventriloquized through doctors, psychologists, care workers, youth office workers, military workers, and so on, the youth courts, and all of these agencies that were involved in tracing, caring for, and relocating children. So where we do have material written

Dan Stone (40:44.28)
words of the children themselves it's it's very difficult Ludwig Gasparik who was discovered at the end of the war claimed that he had been in Auschwitz where his parents were murdered and wanted help he was obviously deeply psychologically troubled he went on the run he disappeared on numerous occasions and to cut a long story short the UNRWA and the ITS eventually lost track of him and he disappeared and his his case

closed. But there are psychological assessments of him in before he disappeared, which show that he was clearly a deeply troubled young man. What's in later years in his TD file, so in his tracing and documentation file, which runs to several decades after the war, we then discover that he made the story up. He was not in Auschwitz. His parents, his father

He claimed his parents were American and this was not true. There was no record of him in American registration records, I think in Chicago maybe, I can't remember exactly where he claimed he'd been born. There were no records of him and it turned out in fact he'd been born in Czechoslovakia, his parents were Czech, they were probably in Buchenwald, he was not Jewish as he'd claimed, his parents were Catholic.

And after the war, went on the run. He was imprisoned in various countries around the world, including in Israel, where he went to try and fight for the IDF in the War of Independence. And then some years later, when he reentered West Germany, he was imprisoned because he didn't have entry requirements. And when interviewed, he acknowledged that he'd made up this story about his childhood and his origins.

Dan Stone (42:43.042)
what can we say? mean, he clearly, he had a history of persecution. He was clearly deeply affected psychologically by what had happened and had a very complex life story after the war. But you never, what I think we see is that sometimes children felt as though they had to say, tell a certain story in order to get heard by the authorities and that

applies to adults as well. are also tales of adults who embellish their stories because they feel that the one that they'd had, the history that they'd had, was not sufficient in order to win the support of the authorities. And that even applies to publish memoirs. We know that there have been memoirs of people who were persecuted by the Nazis, but who then made up

various stories about themselves to make it seem that they were more like the kind of standard template of Holocaust survivors that we're familiar with. And so children sometimes also made these decisions. There's another case in the book, which is a sort of mirror image of Ludwig Gasparich's of a boy who also claims to be a boy called Johnny Christopher or Christfeldt, who also claimed to be American and the authorities didn't believe him.

And yet in his case, it turned out to be true. And by the time that they'd realized this and got the documents from Pittsburgh to prove that it was true, he'd also disappeared. And so the child search branch stories are full of these really sad stories of children who were on the one hand trying to play the system, but on the other hand needed it. But the system was so overwhelmed that they often couldn't care for these children in ways that one would hope.

Waitman Beorn (44:36.03)
mean, that's amazing. And it highlights one of the interesting things. And we'll probably come back to this too about sort of the idea of the archive being really open and useful, but then actually closing and becoming less open towards the end before it actually is sort of thrown wide to everybody. But I mean, I think something worth highlighting just for everybody is how amazing, for example,

the death march stuff is because it's only really recently in Holocaust scholarship that scholars have really been focusing on, you know, what happens on these death marches at the very, very end of the war. So it's incredibly ironic in a certain sense that actually all the kinds of information that they would have liked to have was actually collected at the beginning. And you almost had, you know, dedicated scholars. They weren't there weren't scholars in this, in that sense, but they were dedicated researchers.

You know, it's almost like finding in an archive the topic that you're researching and realizing that someone has researched this for you, you know, 80 years ago. And with that sort of as a, as an example, one of the things that you do in the book is sort of do kind of a case study for us of, of how one can use these documents to tell a story. And it's the, it's these subcamps of gross frozen. Can you, can you talk a little bit about as an historian, you know, how you're using

these, this archive, which again, as I've used it, it's, it's very much sort of a potpourri kind of scattered, you know, I mean, like, I think it's really fascinating to hear how you, how you make sense of this in a way that allows you to tell a story that other documents haven't let us tell sort of the more quote traditional archives and things like

Dan Stone (46:25.986)
Yes, I wanted to write a chapter in the book about the sub camps and I chose to do so on the sub camps of Gross -Rosen and of Auschwitz for similar but opposite reasons. First of all because Gross -Rosen, I think of all the Nazis main camps, remains in the English language historiography the least well known of the main camps and yet by

by January of 1945, it held something like 70 ,000 inmates. It and its 100 subcamps held something like 70 ,000 inmates. So about 11 % of the total of registered concentration camp prisoners at the start of 1945. And Auschwitz, because despite being ubiquitous and extremely well known, the history of its subcamps is very little known, which is kind of ironic because...

anyone who reads a post -war memoir or listens to an oral testimony by survivors will encounter the subcamps because for the most part, Jews who survived did so through being sent to one of these subcamps. So when Primo Levi writes about Auschwitz, he's talking about Auschwitz III, Monowitz, the IG Farben slave labor subcamp, and which became the central hub.

the administration of the other Auschwitz subcamps. But the names seem to have kind of fallen away from popular understanding. So places like Eintrachthüter, Janinergrube, Neudachs, Tjebinje, Blechhammer. These are names that still for the most part don't mean anything because they haven't I think been systematically written about in the historiography.

The same is certainly true for Gross Rosen. If we don't know Gross Rosen main camp, then we're, I say we to mean in general. I don't mean there are specialists who write about these places, but in general, the names of places like Christianstadt or the Riese camps and so on have been also forgotten. Even though one of the Gross Rosen sub camps is Oskar Schindler's factory, perhaps the best known of

Dan Stone (48:46.186)
of all of the subcamps, but its institutional setting is not usually considered. in the ITS archives, so as I mentioned, there's a lot of material relating to the use of slave labor by the SS, negotiations between firms and the SS, for example, about how much they were paying per due per day for different types of slave labor. There's lots of correspondence with firms.

know, invoices, demands for payment and so on, as well as lots of post -war trial investigations and others into guards at these camps, interviews with civilian workers, i .e. local forced laborers, but who were not necessarily camp inmates, who worked alongside concentration camp inmates performing labor and the different ways in which they were treated, investigations into camp

guards and overseers, again, not necessarily SS men, but people employed by firms to run camps because the concentration camp inmates were usually housed by the SS. They would then be marched to the camp where they were under the surveillance of the firms and then marched back again to where they were, to their sleeping quarters. Not always, some of them were on site, but this was a typical

pattern. So there's a huge documentation and I wanted to show how you could use the material in ITS. First of all what you can do is trace the trajectory of people through the concentration camp system. So survivors often survived four, five, six or more camps, main camps and sub camps before being liberated. You can also connect up the slave labor, so the perpetrator records with

the records that follow people's passages through the camp system with their own post -war accounts of survival and care and so on. And so the first thing that I wrote about ITS, which was this little case study of Kristianstadt that I mentioned, tried to show how you could join up an institutional history of the camp together with a social history of the camp itself, what the experience of being in the camp was like for these women who were transferred

Dan Stone (51:09.35)
from Auschwitz to Gross -Rosen to Kristianstadt and the experiences they had of these different sorts of camps, how the camps changed over time, what the overseers were like, what the food was like, what the relations with other inmates was like, what the death march was like, what liberation was like, and then how you could join those documents up with post -war accounts from memoirs and post -war trial records and so on to provide a kind of a more rounded description

of a camp. Again, the ITS records on their own are rarely sufficient to write what we might regard as a sufficient history of the camp. I you couldn't have written your history of Janowska using ITS records only, right? So you've used ITS, but you've had to, and I think in your case, the ITS records are really a small part of the book. And this varies from site to site. In some cases,

the ITS records are quite voluminous and can comprise a substantial part of any historical account. But they always need to be supplemented by other records. But I think that, you I wanted to write about slave labor in particular because it's still an aspect of the Holocaust that is contested. We still hear the term annihilation through labor used as if it were a program of

the SS, which it was not. They certainly regarded Jewish labor as dispensable. There was no kind of, only rarely in a few cases were SS managers thinking in terms of productivity or modern managerial techniques and so on. For the most part, they treated the camp slave laborers as utterly dispensable. the reason why SS firms production was so poor was because of course, if you don't feed your labor force, then they're not going to produce anything.

But this wasn't an alternative way of killing people. mean, if the Nazis had wanted to kill all these people, they would have done so in the ways that were used at the death camps. There was a notion of using these people for work, but they were not treated in ways that were aimed at sustaining them. That changed slightly towards the end of the war when there was a realization that the workforce was running thin.

Dan Stone (53:37.446)
But still there was never an attempt really to care for people in a way that would allow them to work. I'm talking about now slave laborers not non -Jewish forced laborers or those that were transported to work in the Reich for example who were treated differently. So I wanted to show how you could incorporate this history of slave labor into the history of the Holocaust, how the history of the sub -camp system still very much needs to be incorporated into the history of the Holocaust. It's something that I think

complicated for lay readers to understand because if we think of the Holocaust as a process of concentration, deportation and annihilation, the existence of the subcamps system, particularly in the autumn and end of 1944, seems to contradict that story because what were these Jews doing still alive if the idea was to kill them all? And so we have to show

late in the war under the extreme pressures being placed on the German war economy the Nazi ideology was attenuated to a certain extent and that the SS in these desperate circumstances was willing to employ Jews as slave labor for the time being. These were the dead on leave. We shouldn't think that this was a way of saving Jews although for exceptional cases like Schindler it was but this was a way for the SS simply to try

find labor that they desperately needed and that these people would be killed sooner or later. Nevertheless, the fact that the sub camps tended to have a slightly better set of living conditions than those in Auschwitz or Gross -Rosen, for example, meant that the young people who worked in them, and in many cases they were still children, aged between 14 and 18, were in slightly better physical condition than they might otherwise have been and therefore

able to survive the rigours of the death marches in the first months of 1945.

Waitman Beorn (55:36.084)
Yeah, I mean, and this I'm forgetting now which camp this was, but I bring it up because it's something that I just kind of learned recently during a trip to Poland where they literally towards the end of the 19, 1944, they replaced one commandant with another commandant from Germany because he had a lower death rate at his camp in Germany. You know, and you don't, again, like as you kind of pointed out, you don't think of that as like a selling point for a, a concentration camp commandant, but at this stage where people

Dan Stone (56:00.366)
Mm.

Dan Stone (56:04.377)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman Beorn (56:06.076)
are still valued as labor, as you rightly point out. It's not because they don't want Jews to die in sort of the macro sense, but in the moment, it becomes a selling point if you're able to sort of keep a low mortality rate at your camp, which is kind of mind blowing in a certain level. But yeah, that's kind of like what you're suggesting there as well, you know, that labor is still important.

Dan Stone (56:13.934)
Mm

Dan Stone (56:26.158)
Yes.

Dan Stone (56:32.09)
Labor is important for the Nazis at the end of the war. And this is why you see, for example, the last of the main camps to be established at Dora -Mittelbau. This was originally a sub -camp which became an autonomous camp in 1944. This was the site of the production of the V2 rockets. So buried deep into the Harz Mountains in central Germany, these dank tunnels were

camp inmates were forced to labor and the death rate was atrocious. And of course the V2 rockets never succeeded in doing what they were supposed to do. Nevertheless, the use of slave laborers for production became crucial. And the same is true at most of the sub camps. So Christianstadt, again, that I mentioned, this was a place where the women being forced to work there were producing ammunition.

So from the Reich's point of view, this slave labor was really important. These were people working in aviation factories, producing ammunition and so on, and supplementing the factories that existed elsewhere in Germany. But I wanted also to say that amongst the documentation, we find, for example, from the post -war documents, sketches of some of these places.

camps like Gablons or Friedland subcamps of Gross Rosen that we know very little about, but in ITS one can find sketches by former inmates, descriptions of the camps, and these provide insights into the operation of these places that we really don't have from anywhere else.

Waitman Beorn (58:18.416)
And, you know, it's probably worth pointing out that one of the benefits, I think, of a lot of these documents is their close proximity and time to the historical event itself. know, so you're, you're, it doesn't always mean that a source created at the time is more accurate or less accurate, but, you know, particularly with things like those visual representations and maps and kinds of things that are literally fresh.

Dan Stone (58:29.561)
Mm

Waitman Beorn (58:43.672)
in the person's mind. And you mentioned my Inowska book and this is not a podcast about my Inowska book. But this is a segue into another thing, another group that shows up that I think is really interesting in these documents, which is the perpetrators. Because one of the things that I encountered in the ITS was I put the names of all the guards from Inowska in it. And because some of the guards were ethnic Germans,

from what is now Yugoslavia slash Hungary, an area called the, not one of the infamous guards was trying to. Emigrate to United States via the IRO. And there's actually a record of his sort of interview process where literally one of the, it says why his reason is I'm fleeing for political reasons.

Dan Stone (59:17.634)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman Beorn (59:41.124)
And one of the investigators says, you know, he doesn't seem very believable. We're not sure we believe this. And also he has an odd scar under his left arm. You know, he removed an SS tattoo and therefore like stamp rejected. Right. And so like, I only mentioned that because there are other groups who show up sometimes despite perhaps the overall

Dan Stone (01:00:01.486)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:00:10.886)
mission of the the ITS, but also interesting. And maybe you could talk a little about sort of those people, which gets us into sort of the one follow on question, which is sort of. I guess the senior side of of ITS or ICRC in terms of helping people with questionable pasts.

Dan Stone (01:00:31.802)
Right, and this is also a complicated question, and it pertains exactly as you say to the history of ITS after 1949 in particular, and I mention that date because that is the date of the establishment of the Federal Republic of West Germany as a sovereign state, and it's also at that point that the West Germans establish in Arolsen a so -called Sonderstandesamt, so a special register office where

can issue certificates of incarceration for people who've been in camps, death certificates and other official documents from the West German state that are useful for the restitution process because in the 1950s a very large proportion of ITS's work deals with issues of restitution, so compensation payments where proof is needed of people's incarceration in camps and

That reality of the West Germans using ITS as one of the means to display their newfound sovereignty and to show that they are a regular state in the comity of nations with other nations, as well as the Cold War, the IRO task of repatriating or resettling survivors.

And bearing in mind the fact that ITS is not a Holocaust archive, strictly speaking, you know, it contains names of 17 and a half million people. So the majority of these people are not Jews. They're people who were affected by the war and by Nazi persecution. Bearing all those things in mind, we see that particularly in the 19 late 40s and 1950s, there are many people who have dubious pasts during the war.

who try to use the IRO screening process to be repacked, to be resettled in a third country in order not to be returned to their country of origin and to disguise the fact that they were collaborators during the war. So there are extreme cases like the case of your Janowska guards. The most well -known I think in ITS is probably Ivan Demjaniuk, so -called Ivan the Terrible.

Dan Stone (01:02:55.218)
whose card complete with photo IRO application is there in ITS. But there are many, others, low ranking collaborators and perpetrators who tried to get through the net. Now, the fact that your guard was rejected by the IRO is telling because although the allies have been much criticized for failing to stop collaborators getting through the net, actually the IRO

screening officers were quite careful and there are lots of cases, I've cited a few in the book of for example Hungarians or Romanians with German sounding surnames where screeners say, yeah I think this guy is an ethnic German, I don't quite believe this story rejected and so there are lots of cases like that and there are also what you see there are cases of people who slip through the net

and who particularly as the Cold War sets in, so after 48, 49, the rhetoric changes and people escaping from Eastern Europe, from the new Eastern Bloc, also understand that, including Jews. So there are Jews who'd survived Auschwitz, who nevertheless write in their applications for assistance after 1948, that they're escaping from communism. Because they think by that point, because they haven't done this several years before,

think at that point saying I was in Auschwitz is not going to be enough to get them the assistance of the IRO and they are probably right. So there are lots of people in the late 40s who use a kind of cold war tactic of saying I'm being persecuted at home, I was displaced during the war but I'm now being persecuted at home and I need assistance with being resettled to win the help of the IRO. You mentioned the Janowska guards in my book I used the case study

I think particularly egregious case of Romanian fascists members of the iron guard the fascist organization in in Romania who after the war applied for assistance from the IRO in winning compensation from the west German government because after the so -called legionary state which existed in Romania which was a

Dan Stone (01:05:17.882)
a sharing of rule between the Iron Guard and John Antonescu. This lasted from September 1940 to February 1941. After Antonescu booted out the Iron Guard, many of the Iron Guard members were taken to Germany where they were cared for as so -called Ehrenheftlinger, prisoners of honor, and kept in Nazi concentration camps.

They were not like regular inmates. This is very important to note. They were cared for properly, but they were nevertheless incarcerated effectively by the Third Reich, effectively for their own protection. And after the war, many of these people then had the temerity to write to the West German government and to apply to Arlesund for certificates of incarceration and so on and saying, I was imprisoned by the Third Reich.

I was an opponent of the then Romanian government, which was true because they were opponents of Antonescu, and I'm now applying for compensation. These were people who were Romanian fascists whose record was in instigating the pogroms in Bucharest and Jash, which were the precursors to the Holocaust in Romania, who had they been in Romania in 1944 when the Red Army took over the country would have been executed.

with very rare exceptions. The leading Iron Guard members who were in Romania in 1944, 45 were executed in the people's tribunals that took place in Romania after the war. The fact that they were in Nazi concentration camps saved their lives. These were not inmates of camps like we think of when we think of the history of the Holocaust.

And these people's records are in ITS. They're writing from Madrid, from Buenos Aires, from other places where former fascists fled in the post -war world, including actually one or two who did manage somehow to kind of slither and slide their way between organizations in Romania after the war. And they're writing for compensation. It's really extraordinary. And so you can find these records of groups and individuals such as this in ITS sitting alongside

Dan Stone (01:07:39.89)
genuine victims of Nazi persecution. One of the things I think that's sorry, go on. I was just going to say one of the things that's really troubling is that in the 1950s and 60s, as time went on, the ICRC began to interpret its mandate in a way that was very strict in terms of data protection. so would

Waitman Beorn (01:07:43.89)
Yeah, and so, keep going, sorry. No, no, go ahead.

Dan Stone (01:08:07.33)
would not hand out information about its records to people who said they were relatives of the people they were asking for. They would not provide details to Ludwigsburg and other prosecutors in Germany who were trying to investigate potential Nazi war criminals because they said this was against their remit. And they placed enormous delays on

on survivors and relatives looking for information about their loved ones. And by the 1980s, the waiting times were measured in years for this. And so this, this dilatriness was, it's a very uncomfortable record, I think, with respect to the ICRC's behavior in the, in the decades after the 1950s and 60s.

Waitman Beorn (01:08:58.02)
Yeah, and I was going to say this is kind of something that struck me because I like to think I'm a passable Holocaust scholar, but when this came out, was like a, was for many of us, I think it was like, my gosh, people have discovered this amazing collection of Holocaust documents that nobody knew existed. But of course, as you show, like it has existed for,

predates Holocaust scholarship for the most part, right? And so what you, one of the things that I thought was really interesting about the way the book is framed in terms of memory, is that if you sort of think of the greater than or less than signs, you know, the public understanding of the Holocaust is sort of a less than sign starting from like a little bit and expanding out to a greater understanding, you know, with sort of your standard

Dan Stone (01:09:30.414)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:09:58.334)
public marks like Eichmann and some of the Holocaust trials and the Holocaust miniseries and Schindler's etc. But the sort of accessibility and openness of the ITS archives is the greater than sign, starting it a lot and then decreasing to almost nothing to the extent that I think there are lot of very good and very knowledgeable

Holocaust scholars. It just didn't even know that it existed at a certain level until until it got released into the world. And then, you know, some of us were like, my gosh, this is amazing. Can you talk a little about this? I think this is an also interesting part of the story. And again, one of the things that I like to do in the podcast is remind people that, you know, history is not written. It's not over. I mean, like there are there will always be new things that will help us to.

Dan Stone (01:10:38.543)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:10:53.66)
revise and we understand history in different ways.

Dan Stone (01:10:57.731)
That's certainly true when it comes to ITS. I I feel like I've worked with the ITS archive for a decade now, and it's not the only thing I want to do with the rest of my life, but it is in a way the archive that keeps on giving. There's so much material in there, and there's so many more interesting subunits that I haven't yet looked at that I think I will return to it, I'm sure, at some point. But what you say about

Waitman Beorn (01:11:09.396)
Right.

Dan Stone (01:11:28.18)
the strange trajectory from a sort of memory politics point of view with respect to ITS is really intriguing because it's the precise opposite of what we normally think of as the history of Holocaust memory in Germany, in the US, and elsewhere that we have exactly as you say a period of if not silence then

certainly not a kind of systematic understanding of what we would call the Holocaust in the first post -war decade or so. Running through up until, let's say from the 1990s onwards, this explosion of Holocaust memory and its institutionalization in memory sites, museums, memorials, remembrance days, films, a whole raft of education measures and others that

systematized and institutionalized Holocaust memory. And with ITS, what we see is the exact opposite, as you've noted, that in the first post -war decades, we see this immense effort, which is, think, all the more remarkable given the lack of resources in the immediate post -war period to investigate these crimes, to record them, to draw up maps and routes of the death marches, to knock on doors, to find children, to help people find their relatives. And

the decades pass, particularly under ICRC administration, as the decades pass the institution becomes more more secretive. It breaks with Ludwigsburg, it stops working with the central office for the investigation of Nazi war crimes at a certain point. It doesn't cooperate really anymore with what should be partner institutions, whether in the west or across the eastern bloc, and it becomes a kind of secretive organization.

Throughout the first post -war decades, there are monthly newsletters as well as yearly annual reports. By the 1980s, these are no longer produced. So under the administration first of Philippe Tugger and then Charles -Claude Biedermann, these are always Swiss Red Cross appointees, the institution became effectively a secret. It's very hard to understand why. I think it has partly to do with the fact that by the

Dan Stone (01:13:51.982)
The Red Cross was already coming under criticism by historians for its failures during World War II, particularly with respect to the Holocaust. It had other things on its mind. I think by the 1980s, there were all sorts of famines, international crises, et cetera, with which it was dealing. And having to run this tracing service and maintain the archive was kind of a burden from the Red Cross's point of view, from Geneva's point of view. And they didn't really want

be bothered with it. And so this is when you see the period of secrecy, of scholars not being allowed in, of very deletory responses to inquiries about missing persons and loved ones, such that by the late 1990s, when Paul Shapiro from USHMM and others started to say, there's this huge archive and we need to know what's in it, the ICRC's response was, there's nothing to see here.

just a tracing service, which is why I think historians like me and many others, A, didn't know about it and didn't know what was in there. And secondly, that when these discussions began about the need to open ITS, there were historians, particularly in Germany, who I think was slightly embarrassed about the fact that they didn't know what it was saying, this is not that important. We've got huge amounts of documentation relating to the Nazi years already. There's not going to be anything in here

tells us anything we don't already know. And actually, of course, it's not the key to the Holocaust or Nazi persecution. It's not Hitler's secret archive, as it was sometimes referred to in the late 1990s. It is nevertheless a huge repository of material that supplements our ability to write about the Holocaust in particular ways, in ways that are really meaningful and powerful. So the history

the secrecy of the 70s and 80s, the history of the process of forcing the Red Cross to open the archives and its administration since by the German Federal Archives and the International Commission is also an important part of the history of this archive.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:08.028)
Yeah, I mean, and again, we could probably talk for another hour about this interesting stuff, particularly with regards to the Ludwigsberg, you know, obviously, you know, I have a soft spot in my heart for Ludwigsberg because I've spent so many hours, hours there. But it's interesting because, again, you have sort of an organization that in in postwar Germany was is sort of a shining light in in actually fighting to

to prosecute Nazis. And the fact that the ICRC, which has information like this, and also, you know, there's another person that I looked up, a guy named Ivan Kaliman, who was a Ukrainian militiaman in Lviv, but also participated in the roundups of Jews and probably shot at least a couple, because he reports, you know,

that he expended ammunition and stuff. And he gets to the United States because nobody is looking for him. imagine, I'm not saying that in this case, Ludwigsberg was looking for him, but the documents exist in the ITS archive because I looked him up as well. And it says, it has his name and his birth date and says Ukrainian militia policemen during the war. And later on, by the way, there was a denaturalization trial

Dan Stone (01:17:28.632)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:17:36.218)
but imagine if, imagine if he was on Ludwigsberg's radar and they were trying to find him in order to bring him to justice, you know, and they don't have access to the ITS archives, which literally are smoking gun trail to, finding him in the United States, you know, and it's, it's, it's interesting how, as you point out sort of really sort of just kind of basic laziness and embarrassment about we don't really want

Dan Stone (01:17:48.42)
Mm

Waitman Beorn (01:18:06.184)
to be seen as the repository for war criminals or whatnot leads to this lack of engagement.

Dan Stone (01:18:13.962)
Mm Yeah, you can easily find stories like that in ITS. And the failure to collaborate with Ludvigsberg after a certain point is, I think, really quite embarrassing.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:30.642)
Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's it's amazing. mean, but I there's so many stories I really recommend everyone, please, if you're interested at all, check out the book. It'll be in the show notes as always. But also go to the archive and just literally poke around. mean, because you can there are amazing things even just with the online online archive. You can as long as you hit on someone that has documentation.

they're the sort of fragments of a life. sometimes it's a registration card from a camp. And sometimes it's a more positive document, which is the ship that they're leaving on and the address that they're headed to in the United States or someplace else. It's really, really, really worth looking into. And Dan, we've taken up a lot of your time already, but can

Dan Stone (01:19:19.885)
Mm -hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:19:29.896)
We always end with our sort of standard question, is, if you could recommend one book about the Holocaust that you've found particularly interesting or impactful. And again, this is like your favorite band, so it can change, you know, daily. But what would you recommend today on this date?

Dan Stone (01:19:51.122)
Well, that's a very hard question. This is not like my favorite band at all. This is a book that I'm reading at the moment and it's not a history. It's a novel. This is a book by Isaiah Spiegel called Flames from the Earth, a novel from the Wood's ghetto and Spiegel spent four years in the Wood's ghetto and he's I think already well known for a collection of stories called Ghetto Kingdom, which I would recommend everybody to read. It's some of the most painful

direct accounts of life in the wood ghetto that you'll ever come across completely brutal and honest about the moral degradation and the pain of what it meant to live in the ghetto and he wrote in Yiddish after the war became a well -known Yiddish writer and this novel flames from the earth has recently been very beautifully translated into English

It's not, I think, as quite as powerful as his stories, but it nevertheless, it investigates the ghetto, unlike the stories, not just from the perspective of the Jews living in the ghetto, but also from the perspective of Catholic Poles surviving outside the ghetto, both in their dealings with Jews trying to escape from the ghetto and those living in hiding and their relations with

the Germans occupying Poland, as well as from the perspective of some of the German occupiers as well. It's really a remarkable document. although a historian, I often recommend fiction to my students. And I think that among the best Holocaust novels and stories are some of the most insightful.

and powerful accounts of the Holocaust that we have. today, today, I would recommend Spiegel's Flames from the Earth. If you ask me tomorrow, it will be something different, but that's

Waitman Beorn (01:21:55.174)
Amazing. And we will put that in the show notes. In the show notes, I will also link to Dan's book, which is called Fate Unknown. And I also put a link to the ITS. So if you want to jump on there and poke around and just sort of see, you know, the kinds of things you can find there and the kinds of things that historians like Dan and myself use to sort of try to tell this history, I think it's a really cool resource for that. Also, obviously,

If you can please leave us a comment and a rating and let us know how we're doing. And once again, Dan, thank you so much for coming on and telling us about your

Dan Stone (01:22:37.026)
It's been my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.