Skip to content
BY-NC-ND 4.0 license Open Access Published by De Gruyter Oldenbourg 2020

From Tracing and Fate Clarification to Research Center

The Role of International Players and Transnationalism in Shaping the Identity of the ITS

From the book Tracing and Documenting Nazi Victims Past and Present

  • Rebecca Boehling

The Role of International Players and Transnationalism in Shaping the Identity of the ITS

10.1515/9783110665376.

Abstract

The more international influence there was on and within the ITS, the more likely the ITS and its staff were to manifest and reflect a transnational culture of memory of and for an increasingly broadly defined group of victims. This was true early on due to its very international staff; however, with growing Cold War constraints and priorities and an increasing reliance on regional German staff under International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) management, the identity and volume of those served by the ITS narrowed. Only as a result of renewed international pressure following the end of the Cold War were ITS records opened to the public, with copies of the original documents made available to survivors and their families. The ITS changed its practices from using and considering ITS documents exclusively as a means to trace the fate and/or whereabouts of individuals persecuted and/or displaced by the crimes and aggression of the Nazi regime because of a growing understanding by the international community that these documents constituted an end in themselves. This change coincided with the International Commission for the ITS and its affiliated member state archives playing an increasingly pro-active supervisory role over the ITS. This, in turn, encouraged the ITS to conceive of and reconstitute itself as an archive, serving globally both victims and their descendants as well as scholars and journalists for historical research and documentation purposes.

© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston
Downloaded on 29.3.2024 from https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110665376-014/html
Scroll to top button