Arolsen Archives – International Center on Nazi Persecution – ITS

History and Founding

The Arolsen Archives – International Center on Nazi Persecution (formerly the International Tracing Service, ITS) is the world's most comprehensive archive on victims and survivors of National Socialism. Located in Bad Arolsen, Germany, it is an internationally governed institution that documents Nazi crimes, clarifies the fates of persecuted individuals, and provides information to survivors, their families, and researchers worldwide. The collection contains about 30 million records on approximately 17.5 million people and has been inscribed in UNESCO's Memory of the World register.

The Arolsen Archives begin in 1943, when Allied Forces Headquarters at the British Red Cross established a Tracing Bureau to locate missing persons. The Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) formalized this in 1944 as the Central Tracing Bureau. The Bureau relocated after the war to Bad Arolsen  — a central location with an intact infrastructure among the occupation zone. On 1 January 1948, it was renamed the International Tracing Service (ITS). The Allied High Commission for Germany took over management in 1951, followed by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from the 1950s to 2012. The ITS was governed by an International Commission of eleven member states: Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. After decades of restricted access the archive, in 2007, formally opened up to researchers. Unesco, in 2013, inscribed the document collection and Central Name Index into their Memory of the World register. Millions of digitized documents have been made available online since 2019 and the institution adopted its current name, Arolsen Archives.

Collections and Holdings

The Arolsen Archives hold over 30 million documents from concentration camps, forced labor, and displaced persons files, and others persecuted by the Nazi regime alongside the key to the collection: the Central Name Index (CNI). The online archive, which was developed in partnership with Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, provides digital access to a large portion of the collection. The #StolenMemory initiative seeks to return personal belongings, confiscated from concentration camp prisoners, to their families. The #everynamecounts crowdsourcing project engages hundreds of thousands of volunteers in digitizing names and data from archival documents. Approximately 90 percent of the holdings have been scanned as of 2025. One copy of the digitized collection has been distributed to each of the eleven member states. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, DC) serves as the U.S. repository.

Access and Usage

Researchers can access the online archive at arolsen-archives.org. On-site research and educational programs are available in Bad Arolsen. The institution cooperates with memorials, archives, and research institutions internationally, is a Permanent International Partner of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and a participant in the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI).

Arolsen Archives – International Center on Nazi Persecution

Große Allee 5–9
D-34454 Bad Arolsen
Hesse, Germany

Phone: +49 5691 629-0  |  Fax: +49 5691 629-501