By Niamh Hanrahan (University of Manchester)

On May 19, 2025, graduate students, academics, archivists, and researchers came together at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London to discuss the history of tracing individuals persecuted by the Nazi regime during the Second World War. The workshop, generously joint funded by the Royal Historical Society and the Past and Present Society, was organised by Barnabas Balint and Niamh Hanrahan. It focused on exploring the opportunities and challenges presented by one particular collection: the International Tracing Service Archive.

At the close of the Second World War, millions of people were displaced across multiple continents. Parents, children, and siblings searched for their missing relatives. Thus began decades of tracing. Many of these searches were carried out by the International Tracing Service (ITS), which gathered and generated millions of pages of documentation. These documents now make up the ITS Archive, accessible at the Arolsen Archives in Germany and digitally in sites around the world.

Workshop title slide, photograph by Niamh Hanrahan (2025) all rights reserved

In 2011, it was announced that the Wiener Holocaust Library would become the UKs copyholder for this archive. Since then, Holocaust survivors and their descendants, alongside researchers and members of the public have been able to access over 30 million pages of Holocaust-era documents relating to the experiences of over 17.5 million people.

The ITS Archive has now become internationally recognised as an unparalleled resource for tracing individuals and understanding the fates of victims of Nazi persecution. Its material, however, is sorely underrepresented in research in Holocaust Studies and the archive continues to be a grossly underutilized resource. Through their own publications and yearbook, the Arolsen Archives raise awareness of the myriad of ways that their material can contribute to the history of the Second World War and post-war period. Recent scholarly work – by researchers including Dan Stone, Suzanne Brown-Fleming, Jan Lambertz, and Jannifer Rodgers – has also begun to integrate the ITS into our historical vocabulary when talking about the Holocaust.

This workshop took stock of these developments and asked what the future of historical research using the ITS looks like. It presented the opportunities, uses, and benefits of this archive, while also probing its limits, challenges, and silences. Presenters discussed some of the latest approaches to tracing, acknowledging that we as historians use the archive in a very different way to how its creators first used it in the post-war period. Today, this includes tracing objects, ideas, and places as much as it does people.

Niamh Hanrahan presenting, photograph by Barnabas Balint all rights reserved (2025)

The workshop began with a keynote from Elise Bath, International Tracing Service Digital Archive Manger from the Wiener Holocaust Library. Bath presented the institutional history of the ITS, revealing how the archive’s creation influenced its structure, resulting in unique challenges to researchers today. Bath also drew attention to the personal aspects of engaging in this research. She suggested a trauma-informed, person-centred approach to Holocaust research, stressing the importance of collaborative engagement with institutions and communities with a focus on meaningful public engagement. This set the tone for the rest of the day, as we reflected not only upon our work, but on our own position within it.

Following the keynote, the workshop was divided into three panels, each approaching a different aspect of the archive. The first panel, ‘Tracing Mobility and Movement in the ITS’ acknowledged the two key features that sit at the core of the ITS. While mobility and movement are traditional aspects of the ITS, the three papers in this panel took new approaches to them. Niamh Hanrahan’s paper broadened the geographical scope beyond Europe, revealing how the ITS can tell a global history of movement that extends even as far as Asia. Next, Charlie Knight stressed the deeply personal nature of tracing, as he connected letters from private collections with institutional documents from the ITS. Finally, Sonja Mues presented a forthcoming visual history of the Holocaust resource, mapping places, events, and people during the Holocaust. Mues compared and contrasted the ITS with the visual history, raising fundamental questions about missing information, necessary inferences, and the ultimate unknowability of certain parts of Holocaust history.

The second panel, ‘Deconstructing the Archive’, turned our attention to the construction of the ITS archive itself. Leah Schreiber revealed the challenges of finding records of Hasidic Jews in the ITS, exposing the homogenizing impact of Nazi terminology and the issues of using an archive of perpetrator documents. Jan Lambertz took these problems further, reflecting on how broader ITS taxonomies sometimes obscure – or even erase – the identities of those that they supposedly represent. Closing the panel, Frank Trentmann raised the issue of the politics of tracing, placing the ITS into the wider context of post-war tracing in Germany as different groups sought to trace not only Holocaust survivors but, also, missing German soldiers, displaced persons, and civilians.

Eloise Bishop presenting, photograph by Niamh Hanrahan all rights reserved (2025)

Although the ITS is an extensive archive, it is by no means exhaustive. Nor can it be approached in a vacuum. The final panel of the workshop, ‘Converging Archives’, explored how ITS material can be read alongside that from other archives. Eloise Bishop connected concentration camp documents in the ITS that recorded the confiscation and shipment of women’s intimate clothing with undergarments in Holocaust museums and women’s memories of them interviews. Showing these objects personalized the otherwise dehumanized history of expropriation. Following this cross-archival approach, Barnabas Balint revealed how some documents in the ITS archive contain errors, omissions, and distortions. Charting the history of one individual, he compared ITS documents with postwar interviews, newspaper clippings, and institutional records.

To close the workshop, the group came together to reflect on the main themes from the presentations. The day had been an opportunity to develop new ideas: students who had little experience using the ITS left with new pathways forward for their research and researchers with years of experience considered new approaches to old problems. We will now publish a collection of papers from the workshop as a special issue of a journal, sharing our ideas and reflections with the wider scholarly community. From the individual and personal to the global and theoretical, the workshop has revealed the ITS archive’s depth and breadth. As we turn to the future of research, we can be confident that this archive still has much to contribute.