Due to historic circumstances, most of the documentation captured on the liberation of the camp is not to be found at the Arolsen Archives but rather at the Archives of the Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum and at other archives in Poland and Russia. Nevertheless, the Arolsen Archives received copies of these documents over the years and utilized these for their tracing and documentation efforts.
The excellent cooperation between the Arolsen Archives and the Archives of the Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum is continuing – the institutions have recently signed a new cooperation agreement and are exchanging documentation and information, allowing the Arolsen Archives to replace many of the old low-quality copies from the Archives of the Auschwitz Birkenau state Museum with newer, indexed scans, which will be made available to the public in collection 1.1.2.6. “Documentation from the Archives of the Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum”.
What is to be found at the archives?
The Arolsen Archives archival holdings are vast, comprised of well over 95,000,000 pages. Early in its history, the Arolsen Archives understood that its mandate can only be fulfilled by acquiring relevant documents, a process which has continued relentlessly throughout most of the institution’s existence.
The holdings are divided into five main theme-based groups:
- Camps, Deportations and Prisons – this group contains 13 million documents from concentration camps, Jewish wartime organizations and more. Among the most important collections of original documentation are the Dachau and Buchenwald documentation captured almost intact by the Americans, as well as original lists of deportees sent from Berlin to the East.