Explore the collection

Our focus is on documents relating to concentration camp prisoners, documents relating to forced labor under the Nazi regime, and records from the post-war period

The original documents containing names, photos, and information about the fates of around 17.5 million people help us to reconstruct individual paths of persecution. But that is not all – many of the documents held by the Arolsen Archives shed light on broader topics, such as the system of imprisonment in the concentration camps or the scale of forced labor. Read on to gain insights into some of our collections documenting Nazi persecution and the lasting impact of Nazi crimes long after 1945.

Our holdings

When the International Tracing Service (ITS) was founded in 1948, it only held a small number of documents. Alongside copies of lists of names and reference cards to facilitate tracing, most of the documents that were collected in Arolsen were related to investigations.

The ITS archive as we know it today did not begin to take shape until around 1952. One of the reasons for this development was the closure of the Allies’ zonal tracing offices, which transferred their collections to Arolsen. The archive also received hundreds of thousands of lists of foreign forced laborers. These lists had been compiled by German authorities, companies, and other agencies on the orders of the Allies. When the International Refugee Organization was disbanded, the ITS also received over 30 tons of registration documents for displaced persons at the end of 1952.

To this day, the archive is divided into three major collection groups:
– Documents from concentration camps and other places of detention
– Documents on forced laborers
– Documents on displaced persons