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Already in 1944, the British government organized a Central Tracing Bureau for the registration and tracing of missing people resulting from Axis persecution. In 1955, after several reorganizations and relocations, the center ultimately was named International Tracing Service (ITS) and established with its permanent archives in the West-German town of Arolsen. It was put under…
After the Second World War, as the Cold War was gearing up, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union competed to secure the spoils of war in occupied Germany. For instance, with “Operation Paperclip,” the U.S. transferred many German rocket scientists to the U.S., first as privileged prisoners, but later as voluntary immigrants willing to…
Since the Geneva Convention of 1929 only covered prisoners of war, the Third-Reich authorities consistently denied the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) access to its concentration camps. This changed only toward the end of the war, when the German authorities realized that they could no longer maintain the camps due to Germany’s collapsing…
The Third Reich’s term Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) translates to Imperial National or simply Homeland Security Main Office. It was established in 1939 and merged Germany’s police forces (Gestapo and ordinary police) and the SS intelligence-gathering service Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service) into one governmental body. This office was directly subordinate to the Chief of the German Police Heinrich…
The Third Reich’s department named Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt (WVHA) translates to Economic and Administrative Main Office. It was established in 1942 by merging two previously independent offices of the SS. The WVHA was directly subordinate to Heinrich Himmler as the Reichsführer SS. This office handled all financial and administrative matters concerning the SS and its…
The Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem is the most important site of the orthodox Holocaust ideology, second only perhaps to Auschwitz itself. The Center runs a museum, a research center, and an online Holocaust encyclopedia. But the most ambitious project of this institution is the attempt to identify all victims of the…
Under (West) German law, a district attorney’s office can investigate a crime only if either the crime location or the residence of a suspect is located in its area of jurisdiction. Since many claimed National-Socialist crimes were committed outside of Germany, and because the residence of many suspected perpetrators was either unknown, scattered around Germany…
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