The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the International Tracing Service (ITS), and The Wiener Library have launched the first in a series of primary source supplements based on documents from the ITS digital collections. The three institutions are working in partnership to design these new educational resources available to all, but with particular attention to the needs of university undergraduate course syllabi in order to support instructors who want to utilize primary source material to teach about the Holocaust.
The Allied powers established the ITS after World War II to help reunite families separated during the war and to trace missing relatives. Millions of pages of captured documentation have been repurposed for tracing, and the ITS has continued to grow as new records, both originals and copies, have been deposited within its collections. For decades, the ITS strove not only to clarify the fates of victims of the Nazis but also to provide survivors and victims’ families with the documentation necessary for indemnification claims. In November 2007, the archive was made accessible to scholars and other researchers and both tracing and scholarly research continues today onsite at the ITS in Bad Arolsen, Germany, as well as at seven digital copyholders around the world. The USHMM and The Wiener Library are two such institutions.
The first publication in this series, "Women under Nazi Persecution," is now available on each of the partners’ websites for free download, and at least three more will follow in the near future. This publication is part of an effort to make primary source documentation available for pedagogical work in university courses and other settings and to raise awareness of the ITS archive's unique holdings and powerful research potential.
Women under Nazi Persecution
From the treatment of pregnant forced laborers to women forced into prostitution in concentration camps: the first issue of a new online series of publications, based on documents from the International Tracing Service (ITS) archive, is dedicated to particular forms of exploitation and persecution of women by the Nazis.
Margit Vogt