Qualla: Arolsen Archives

Arolsen Archives: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The key to the whole archive is a card index filed by sound. Fifty million references, arranged not alphabetically but alphabetically-phonetically, so that a name spelled one way in a Polish village, another way by a German camp clerk, and a third way by an American officer with a typewriter still lands in the same drawer. That decision, made by people whose job was to answer letters from families, is the difference between an archive and a search. The Arolsen Archives hold around 30 million documents on Nazi persecution, forced labour and the Holocaust, with information on more than 17.5 million people - the most comprehensive record anywhere of the individuals the regime imprisoned, deported, worked and killed. It sits in a quiet spa town in northern Hesse, forty-five kilometres west of Kassel.

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Arolsen Archives: A Bureau That Followed the Front

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It started while the war was still on. In 1943 the international section of the British Red Cross was asked by Allied headquarters to set up a registration and tracing service for missing people, and on 15 February 1944 it was formalised under Supreme Headquarters Allied Expediti...

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Arolsen Archives: Twenty-Six Kilometres of Paper

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Laid end to end, the original documents run to 26,000 linear metres, backed by 232,710 metres of microfilm and over 106,870 microfiches. The holdings divide into three: incarceration, forced labour, displaced persons. What that means in practice is the paperwork of a bureaucracy ...

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Arolsen Archives: The Closed Years

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For half a century almost none of this was open. The service, backed by the German government, cited German archival law and its hundred-year privacy rule; critics pointed out that an internationally governed body was arguably not subject to German law at all, and some accused it...

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Arolsen Archives: The Letters Still Come

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

More than a thousand inquiries arrive every month, from all over the world. The mix has changed: searching for living survivors now accounts for around three per cent of the work, and most letters come from grandchildren and great-grandchildren who want to know what happened to s...

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Arolsen Archives: Every Name Counts

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The current project is to make the paper searchable by anyone. Scanned documents have been going online through the archive's digital collections since 2015, and the transcription - turning handwriting and stamped forms into text a database can read - is being done by volunteers ...

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