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Dan Stone tells the story of the last great unknown archive of Nazism, the International Tracing Service, set up to find missing persons at the end of World War II. Spanning across death marches, slave labour, and liberation,
Fate Unknown uncovers the history of this remarkable archive which holds over 30 million documents.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Prologue
- Introduction: Tracing the Holocaust
- 1: Tracing the Tracers: The History and Politics of Tracing
- 2: Discoveries: Tracing Stories
- 3: Slaves for the Reich: The Nazi Sub-camp Systems of Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen
- 4: Columns of Misery: Death Marches and Liberation
- 5: The Legion of the Lost
- 6: Survivors, Displaced Persons, Refugees: The Searchers and the Searched For
- 7: Tracing Survival
- 8: Europe's Missing Children
- Conclusion: The ITS and Holocaust Consciousness
About the author
Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he has taught since 1999. Prior to that, he was a Junior Research Fellow at New College, Oxford.
Summary
Dan Stone tells the story of the last great unknown archive of Nazism, the International Tracing Service. Set up by the Allies at the end of World War II, the ITS has worked until today to find missing persons and to aid survivors with restitution claims or to reunite them with loved ones. From retracing the steps of the 'death marches' with the aim of discovering the burial sites of those murdered across the towns and villages of Central Europe, to knocking on doors of German foster homes to find the children of forced labourers, Fate Unknown uncovers the history of this remarkable archive and its more than 30 million documents.
Under the leadership of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the tracing service became one of the most secretive of postwar institutions, unknown even to historians of the period. Delving deeply into the archival material, Stone examines the little-known sub-camps and, after the war, survivors' experience of displaced persons' camps, bringing to life remarkable stories of tracing. Fate Unknown combs the archives to reveal the real horror of the Holocaust by following survivors' horrific journeys through the Nazi camp system and its aftermath.
The postwar period was an age of shortage of resources, bitterness, and revenge. Yet the ITS tells a different story: of international collaboration, of commitment to justice, and of helping survivors and their relatives in the context of Cold War suspicion. These stories speak to a remarkable attempt by the ITS, before the Holocaust was a matter of worldwide interest, to carry out a programme of ethical repair and to counteract some of the worst effects of the Nazis' crimes.
Additional text
It is essential reading for scholars of German-occupied Europe and the Holocaust who are looking for new avenues of research. Genealogists will also benefit from the overview of the archive and the introduction to various collections within it.
