Workshop | 29 May 2025 | Wiener Holocaust Library, London
Tracing the Holocaust
Call for Papers, deadline – 14 March 2025
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.
In this one-day workshop, hosted at the Wiener Holocaust Library, we bring together PhD candidates and early career researchers to reflect on their uses of the archive in new research. The workshop focuses on tracing individuals persecuted under the Nazi regime, reflecting on the process and results of tracing both in the past and by researchers today. We will discuss some of the latest approaches to researching tracing and connect researchers with key resources held by the Wiener Holocaust Library, especially highlighting the potential of the ITS Archive.
The ITS Archive has become internationally recognised as an essential source for tracing individuals and understanding the fates of victims of Nazi persecution. The Archive holds crucial information on the fates and experiences of individuals, such as Tracing and Documentation Files (T/D Files) and Care and Maintenance Forms (CM/1 forms). This material, however, is thus far sorely underrepresented in research in Holocaust Studies and the ITS Archive continues to be a grossly underutilized resource. Despite the collections opening to researchers in 2007, the first monograph on ITS was only published in 2023 by Dan Stone, adding to Suzanne Brown-Fleming’s 2016 work outlining the possibilities of the ITS Archive. Both of these works built on foundational research by Jennifer Rodgers, whose forthcoming monograph will explore the institutional history of the ITS in the context of the Cold War.
Defining ‘tracing’ broadly, the workshop hopes to explore work concerned with, but not limited to, the following:
- Methodologies of tracing (different document types, scales of analysis with local and national archives, cross-archival research, digital v physical tracing, etc.)
- The evolution of tracing since 1945 and/or the histories of tracing efforts in the post-war era
- The voice of the individual within tracing
- The relevance of tracing in Holocaust historiography
- The increasing importance of material culture (i.e. documents) in the post-witness era
- The ITS Archive and Holocaust memory
The Wiener Holocaust Library is one of only seven institutions to hold a complete digital copy of the ITS Archive. Furthermore, as a place that brings together many key archives relating to the Holocaust (the ITS Archive, USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, and its own archival holdings), the Wiener Holocaust Library is a central location for the important and as yet underdeveloped work of integrating tracing across archives.
At the workshop, participants will hear from ITS Archive researchers at the Wiener Holocaust Library, present on their own work that uses the ITS Archive, and take part in a group discussion on the future of ITS Archive research. There will also be the opportunity to see the travelling exhibition Fate Unknown, which explores the history of the ITS and the search for the missing after the Holocaust. We encourage participants to use the workshop as a space to develop new ideas for substantial research which could be developed into articles for publication.
Applicants are invited to submit a short biography (150 words) and an abstract (200 words) to Niamh Hanrahan (niamh.hanrahan@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk) and Barnabas Balint (bbalint@ushmm.org) by Friday 14th March 2025.