Nazi Records Available for Tracing Holocaust Victims

Those who believe their relatives may have been victims of the Nazi Holocaust now can apply for Red Cross help in searching wartime German concentration camp records seized by the American military nearly half a century ago.

Access to the files to trace the fate of family members can be obtained by completing a form at Red Cross offices.

American Red Cross President Elizabeth Hanford Dole released information Tuesday containing 7,000 names.

She said that within a year, information on as many as 500,000 more names of victims will be integrated into the files of the International Tracing Service in Arolsen, Germany, which is operated by the International Red Cross.

The records, which include transport lists, “death books,” lists of victims of medical experiments and forced labor at concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Buchenwald, were confiscated for use as evidence in war crimes trials after the collapse of Nazi Germany.

Robert Kesting of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council in Washington, among those first recognizing the value of the records, said that only historians and scholars had been using the files since they were declassified more than 20 years ago. “The records have been there,” he said. “It’s just that it wasn’t applied to victims per se, or the tracing of victims.”

Dole said that after a search request is filed at a local Red Cross office, it will be forwarded to the Holocaust and War Victims Tracing and Information Center in Baltimore, where it will be recorded.

It will then be sent to the tracing service in Germany. Officials said it could take a year or more to complete research on a specific information request.

At a press conference attended by representatives of more than a dozen Jewish organizations, Dole said: “The news that the documents provide is rarely good news, but it renders a service which cannot be measured. And it allows family members to move on in the grieving process.”