From fragile original to high-quality digital copy
How unreadable negative copies are gradually disappearing from our online archive
Original incarceration documents from concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau have been stored at Arolsen Archives for nearly eighty years. Not locked away in archive boxes, though, but—for decades—used as working material, touched thousands of times and threatened with imminent disintegration. For this reason, copies were already being made early on. Now a portion of the documents are being newly sorted and digitized in order to preserve them better and glean even more information from them.
“Those of us involved in the working process are presumably some of the last people who will ever hold these originals in their hands,” says Elke Helmentag, the head of the Arrangement Team. She and her staff of two are currently inspecting and sorting original imprisonment documents from the Buchenwald concentration camp. These are documents the Americans handed over to the International Tracing Service (ITS), the Arolsen Archives’ predecessor organization, after World War II.
From working material to archival material
Ever since, the documents have served the archive employees as fundamental working material and an important source of information—at first in the search for missing persons, then for the clarification of claims to reparation payments, and these days above all for research and for descendants who want to know more about persecuted members of their family. Having been removed from folders, paged through, and copied thousands of times, meanwhile brittle and yellowed, some letters hardly legible, the documents have been stored in a depot for many years to protect them.
Making originals accessible
For years, search teams worked with copies instead—copies made with the limited technology of the time. “When you look through our online archive today, you still find a lot of these black negative copies,” Elke Helmentag explains. “We want to make the originals directly accessible as information sources and preserve them permanently. So we scan them at a high resolution.” Depending on the condition, the team cleans the document beforehand, removing metal paper clips and staples as well as tape in the process. If there is a threat of damage, the document is turned over directly to the team responsible for preservation, which initiates conservatorial measures.
More compartmentalized, need-oriented registers
Most of the originals this project is concerned with are incarceration documents, in many cases confusing and difficult-to-read lists of thousands of names, but also prisoner registration forms previously archived in roughly categorized folders. “Within the framework of the redigitization, we’re now going about the work in a much more compartmentalized manner. We’re rearranging everything, and creating entirely new document registers. In the future, every single transport, every transfer will have its own register unit with a description that will enable users to research not only by name, but also by date, place of origin, and destination.”
The new, detailed descriptions in the online archive help both researchers as well as family members make their searches more targeted and find information on events and fates quickly. “There are many very different reasons why people visit our online archive. This way, we can serve their individual needs better,” Helmentag adds.
Important warning for posterity
The project is progressing quickly. The team is already finished with the documents from the Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen, Stutthof, Lichtenburg, and Sachsenburg concentration camps. The daily work with the lists and thousands of names never becomes a routine matter for the team: “These originals are so matter-of-fact and at the same time they document so many horrible fates. That’s often really hard to take. But we have to push that aside and carry on, because, after all, we want to—we have to—remember and warn the later generations: “Look at this; look at what happened.” Apart from Buchenwald, the team is currently also working on surviving documents from the Theresienstadt and Gross-Rosen camps. The dark, illegible copies will gradually disappear from the online archive.