Image: The main build­ing of the Inter­na­tion­al Trac­ing Ser­vice (ITS) in Bad Arolsen built in 1952. Copy­right: Inter­na­tion­al Trac­ing Ser­vice (ITS), pho­to: Andreas Greiner-Napp”

Table of Con­tents
The Inter­na­tion­al Trac­ing Ser­vices (ITS) as a unique archive  |  Ori­gins  |  Mis­sion  |  British-Indi­an Sol­diers at the ITS  |  Mem­o­ry and memo­ri­al­i­sa­tion, inter­ment and exhuma­tion  |  Hid­den tran­script  |  The domain of work and non-work  | Bib­li­og­ra­phy

The International Tracing Services (ITS) as a unique archive

This post brings to atten­tion the exis­tence of an inter­na­tion­al archive in the heart of Europe, large­ly over­looked by South Asian researchers work­ing on WWII, who rou­tine­ly vis­it the India Office Library (British Library), the Nation­al Archives of India, The Nation­al Archives in Kew, UK, and oth­er region­al archives engag­ing with the his­to­ry of the British Raj. The (ITS) hold­ings com­ple­ment the afore­men­tioned sources both quan­ti­ta­tive­ly and qual­i­ta­tive­ly if one is writ­ing the his­to­ry of British-Indi­an sol­diers and civil­ians. Its spe­cial­i­ty lies in giv­ing his­to­ri­ans access to indi­vid­ual des­tinies of South Asian sol­diers, who entered the reg­is­ters of Ger­man offi­cial­dom as an enslaved mass, serv­ing a spe­cif­ic pur­pose in cap­tiv­i­ty, and the civil­ians who endured in the vagaries of the Third Reich.

Origins

As ear­ly as 1943, the Allied Forces trans­formed their Depart­ment of Inter­na­tion­al Affairs into a Trac­ing Bureau in Lon­don for trac­ing and reg­is­ter­ing miss­ing per­sons. The loca­tion of the ITS moved from Lon­don to Ver­sailles, on to Frank­furt am Main and final­ly to Bad-Arolsen in Jan­u­ary 1946. Bad Arolsen, a small town in Hesse/Germany, was cho­sen because of its cen­tral loca­tion between the four occu­pa­tion zones and because its infra­struc­ture was still intact after WWII.

Mission

The ITS has a four­fold mis­sion: doc­u­men­ta­tion, research, infor­ma­tion and com­mem­o­ra­tion. The ini­tial mis­sion in the imme­di­ate post-war years was human­i­tar­i­an, aimed at help­ing the kin and the vic­tims trace each oth­er and help­ing sur­vivors in their reha­bil­i­ta­tion. Grad­u­al­ly, it devel­oped into a store­house for pos­ter­i­ty. This involved the preser­va­tion and pro­duc­tion of doc­u­ments relat­ed to sev­er­al types of Nazi Par­ty organ­i­sa­tions and their actions, as well as those relat­ed to vic­tims of Nazism. An impor­tant part of this was the reg­is­tra­tion of the per­se­cut­ed for­eign­ers and Ger­mans alike by Ger­man pub­lic insti­tu­tions, social wel­fare agen­cies (Sozialamt) and com­pa­nies from 1939–47. The ITS thus gath­ered large amounts of approx­i­mate­ly 30 mil­lion doc­u­ments from con­cen­tra­tion camps, ghet­tos, pris­ons, labour camps, sana­to­ria, infir­maries, asy­lums and lat­er DP camps. The doc­u­ments were gen­er­at­ed in the form of filled out ques­tion­naires on death, birth, mar­riage, divorce, hos­pi­tal stays, and sana­to­ri­um, asy­lum or DP camp admis­sion cards. Oth­er doc­u­ments includ­ed labour cards, med­ical cards or health insur­ance cards. This led to the gen­er­a­tion of pro­files of per­se­cut­ed indi­vid­u­als across nation­al­i­ties and regions.

Anna Meier-Osinski among the correspondance files of the International Tracing Service
Fig­ure 1: Anna Meier-Osin­s­ki, Head of Trac­ing Inves­ti­ga­tions into Nazi Vic­tims Branch, among the cor­re­spon­dence files of the ITS. About three mil­lion cor­re­spon­dence files are kept in the archives of the ITS. They com­prise cor­re­spon­dence between the ITS and offices, sur­vivors of Nazi per­se­cu­tion and their fam­i­ly mem­bers.
Copy­right: Inter­na­tion­al Trac­ing Ser­vice (ITS),
Pho­to: Uwe Zucchi

Since 2015, the archive has grad­u­al­ly been pub­lish­ing an increas­ing num­ber of its hold­ings on its Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tion Online plat­form, which pro­vides small insights into the archive at https://digitalcollections.its-arolsen.org/.

Today, the archive helps schol­ars of the world in research­ing the ways in which one of the most well-organ­ised and smooth­ly func­tion­ing states, name­ly Nazi Ger­many, oper­at­ed in com­mit­ting crimes against human­i­ty. The ITS allows us to get under­neath the skin of a crim­i­nal state and lays bare how the per­pe­tra­tors’ mind oper­at­ed dur­ing the war years, by pre­serv­ing the records of the pre­rog­a­tive state. Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, it also gen­er­at­ed its own records in the post-war era, which filled infor­ma­tion­al gaps, espe­cial­ly in the chaot­ic peri­od from 1943–4, when the Ger­man land­scape was filled with DPs and state­less people.

British-Indian Soldiers at the ITS

The first clue to the pres­ence of British-Indi­an sol­diers, the largest cat­e­go­ry in the ITS cat­a­logue, is the Allied Order of Decem­ber 6, 1945. It instruct­ed all civil­ian author­i­ties of Ger­many to con­duct exhaus­tive search­es for doc­u­ments and infor­ma­tion con­cern­ing mil­i­tary and civil­ian per­sons belong­ing to the Unit­ed King­dom since 1939 and to sub­mit their find­ings imme­di­ate­ly to their respec­tive com­mand of occu­pa­tion forces. This British high­way to the abode of British-Indi­an vic­tims and sur­vivors of the Third Reich led me to rich evi­dence for the his­to­ry of insti­tu­tion­al remem­brance of British-Indi­an sub­jects in the heart of Ger­many. The very estab­lish­ment of the ITS chal­lenged  Nazi knowl­edge pro­duc­tion and reversed it by con­duct­ing tar­get­ed search­es into what Nazis want­ed to hide or destroy in the last years of war.

The avail­able hold­ings deal with the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, enu­mer­a­tion, reg­is­tra­tion and doc­u­men­ta­tion of British-Indi­ans as sol­diers, civil­ians and dis­placed per­sons. An over­whelm­ing pro­por­tion of these hold­ings con­sist of infor­ma­tion about pris­on­ers of war, dead or alive, from a host of Sta­lags (POW camps) Arbeit­skom­man­dos (labour camps), Lazarette (sick bays) and san­i­taria or men­tal asy­lums. There are about 383 scanned images under Attribute IND, which con­sist of lists of sol­diers in graves or ceme­ter­ies (with details such as the rea­son of death, date of birth and death, and grave loca­tion), labour camps and fac­to­ries that housed them, pay­ment reg­is­ters, and so on. There is anoth­er set of 36 scanned images under Attribute Per­son­alien IND, which deal with 5 civil­ians (among them stu­dents, house­wives, DPs, sea­men, civil­ians) and births and deaths of chil­dren born dur­ing the war years. As far as British Indi­an sol­diers are con­cerned, the ITS col­lec­tion is cloaked in icy silences when it comes to the spo­ken words of the per­se­cut­ed. So, we prac­ti­cal­ly have no ego doc­u­ments or arte­facts such as diaries, tes­ti­monies or let­ters from the sur­vivors to give us a peek into their sub­jec­tive world.

A strik­ing fea­ture of the lists is that they show the  spa­tial spread and pres­ence of the cap­tives, despite their rel­a­tive­ly small num­bers, a pres­ence, which was marked by their erasure/disappearance/death. There was no escape from the omnipresent threat of death dur­ing war years.  This applied even more so to cap­tives. If we bare­ly take death records of the cap­tives as an indi­ca­tor, their geo­graph­i­cal spread is exhaus­tive. Their corpses could be found in remote vil­lages and towns such as Ans­bach, Fuessen, Bad-Neustadt, Bad- Reichen­hall, Bischoef­s­gru­en, Bercht­es­gaden, Oelkofen, Garmisch, Regens­burg, Ober­roning, West­er­timke, Her­born, Darm­stadt, Bre­mer­vo­erde, Nürn­berg  and Starn­berg, Augs­burg, Koenigs­brueck, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Wet­ter­ing, Lauter­hofen, Ful­da, Giessen, Wies­baden, West­er­timke, Darm­stadt and Son­thofen as iso­lat­ed or cluster-graves.

Memory and memorialisation, interment and exhumation

Pris­on­ers of war sel­dom speak out, deceased pris­on­ers of war even less so. But the cul­tur­al pol­i­tics of interment/knowledge/power, as it was played out over their mor­tal remains, left clues about the con­tes­ta­tion over their impe­r­i­al own­er­ship. In the bur­ial ‘rites’, if one may call them rites at all, it became grad­u­al­ly clear as to which empire lord­ed over whose corpse and whose corpse was dis­owned by both. The British and Ger­man empires locked horns once again in the post-war years amid the corpses of their cap­tives on the bat­tle field of mem­o­ry and memo­ri­al­i­sa­tion, inter­ment and exhuma­tion. So, there were these corpses and there were those corpses. There were some whose pres­ence was not­ed on a shred of paper stamped “grave registration”.

These could be the very ordi­nary pris­on­ers of war, nei­ther defin­i­tive­ly on this nor on that side. Then there were some oth­ers that lay buried in mil­i­tary or civil­ian ceme­ter­ies with grave num­bers and per­son­al details record­ed on the cer­tifi­cates. These were pos­si­bly the Indi­an Legion sol­diers. And then there were those corpses that were exhumed by the ITS team, brought to a war ceme­tery in Berlin, or trans­port­ed to a more appro­pri­ate loca­tion. There they were interred once again, this time with full state hon­ours. Their mar­tyr­dom and mem­o­ry was etched in stone for pos­ter­i­ty. They secured a place in the cul­tur­al his­to­ry of memo­ri­al­i­sa­tion as a reward for their loy­al­ty to the British Empire till the bit­ter end.

In the Thomp­son­ian sense, then, the ITS hold­ings enable his­to­ri­ans to res­cue British Indi­an sol­diers, dead or alive, irre­spec­tive of their virtues and vices, from the con­de­scen­sion of pos­ter­i­ty (Thomp­son, 1980: 12), as twice colonised peas­ants in uni­forms, as cul­tur­al­ly and social­ly exposed to a cos­mopoli­tan envi­ron­ment behind the barbed wire, which taught them sur­vival strate­gies that they knew lit­tle of when they left home on an uncer­tain journey.

Although usu­al­ly inher­ent to knowl­edge gen­er­a­tion for pos­ter­i­ty, some of the hold­ings nonethe­less betray an ele­ment of com­pul­sion ‘from above’, (this time from the “Allied”), to report the dead, sur­viv­ing, or miss­ing per­sons. The offi­cial reluc­tance on the part of the Ger­mans to gen­er­ate or fur­nish such doc­u­ments can be traced in some instances. This is proven by the pres­ence of grave cer­tifi­cates that were pro­duced at a much lat­er date. To give one exam­ple- on one instance the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion from a civ­il func­tionary reads at the end of a doc­u­ment: “I cer­ti­fy to the best of my knowl­edge and con­science that the required infor­ma­tion giv­en above is the cor­rect and com­plete repro­duc­tion of avail­able doc­u­ments at hand”. The doc­u­ment is stamped for the year 1950, though the actu­al dates of deaths were much ear­li­er (1944 and 1945).  Thus, as can be seen in the image below, there was reluc­tance in report­ing deaths as can be dis­cerned from the fact that such sworn doc­u­ments were fur­nished years later.

Death Certificate of four British-Indian soldiers contained in the Archive of the International Tracing Service
Fig­ure 2: Death Cer­tifi­cate of four British-Indi­an sol­diers. The cer­tifi­cate was issued on Jan­u­ary 20, 1950 for deaths that occurred in late 1944 and ear­ly 1945.
Copy of 2.1.1.1/70311783, in con­for­mi­ty with the ITS Archives, Bad Arolsen, Archivnum­mer: 5724, attribute IND 192. Image cour­tesy The ITS Archives, Bad Arolsen.

Hidden transcript

What was record­ed and pre­served will­ing­ly or unwill­ing­ly at the ITS, might fill any his­to­ri­an with a sense of void, the loss of spo­ken word, of non-ver­bal exchanges, of ges­ture and gaze. Nev­er­the­less, if one goes with the sen­si­bil­i­ties of anthro­pol­o­gists and every­day his­to­ri­ans such as James Scott, Car­lo Ginzberg and Alf Lüdtke, one might be able to find hid­den tran­scripts (Scott:1990), the off-stage every­day life, and attempt to recre­ate it through the small clues and hints that oppres­sors’ records have left behind. The fol­low­ing exam­ple illus­trates this: It is tak­en from the lists of deceased cap­tives. Despite the sig­nif­i­cant geo­graph­i­cal spread of cap­tives’ graves, I found clues to omis­sions, wil­ful or oth­er­wise. Some cas­es were report­ed as late as 1947, 1948 or even 1951. Columns such as place of birth and death and rea­son of death were either left blank or not­ed unknown in sev­er­al forms. Renewed search­es were con­duct­ed, which result­ed in Sup­ple­men­tary Lists of Graves. Fresh sites were dug up by search teams, corpses were exhumed and their per­son­al details added to reg­is­tered deaths sub­se­quent­ly.  One such Sup­ple­men­tary List of Graves report­ed a col­lec­tive grave of 10 cap­tives in July 1949. They had been dead since Sep­tem­ber. 1944. It turned out that 9 of them died in a sin­gle air raid and the one remain­ing suc­cumbed to his abdom­i­nal mem­brane infec­tion a week after the air raid.

Supplementary List of Graves from Darmstadt contained in the Archive of the International Tracing Service
Fig­ure 3: Sup­ple­men­tary List of Graves from Darm­stadt.
Copy of 2.1.1.2/70497245 in con­for­mi­ty with the ITS Archives, Bad Arolsen, 27.11.2014, Archivnum­mer 5724, attribute IND 234. Image cour­tesy The ITS Archives, Bad Arolsen.

The oth­er numer­i­cal­ly rich, but spa­tial­ly con­cen­trat­ed cat­e­go­ry of  cap­tives con­sists of forced labour around  Sax­ony, Rhein­land Palati­nate and parts of Baden Wuert­tem­berg as shown in the image below.

 A page from the list of captive British-Indian labour employed in an aluminium factory in Bitterfeld contained in the International Tracing Service archives
Fig­ure 4: A page from the list of cap­tive British-Indi­an labour employed in an alu­mini­um fac­to­ry in Bit­ter­feld, a coun­ty of Sax­ony-Anhalt.
Copy of 2.1.4.2/70971035, in con­for­mi­ty with the ITS Archives, Bad Arolsen, 27.11.2014, Archivnum­mer 5724, attribute IND 300. Image cour­tesy The ITS Archives, Bad Arolsen.

The domain of work and non-work

What did every­day life mean to a cap­tive? What was the domain of his work and non-work? To get a sense of how the every­day forms of dom­i­na­tion and sub­or­di­na­tion worked, we need to go to local sites inhab­it­ed by Indi­an cap­tives to observe how Indi­an offi­cers act­ed on the ground to con­vert cap­tives for the cause of the Indi­an Legion and per­suade them to join it. “The POWs were often ill treat­ed. It became a cus­tom to make the pris­on­er vis­it ‘the con­ver­sion camp’ at Lacanau where he was shown the advan­tages of a legionary’s life. Those who declined were pres­surised by oth­er means to com­ply” (Oester­held 2015). Though such sub­jec­tive nar­ra­tives can­not be found at the ITS, I found some pay­ment entries of the IG Far­ben, a Ger­man enter­prise, which allow us a glimpse into what work might have meant to the cap­tive. These reg­is­ters show a sched­ule of 8 hours a day, 6 days a week until lib­er­a­tion in mid1945 for half a Reichs­mark per day. Hack­en­holz, who worked on the his­to­ry of IG Far­ben, sug­gests that even Russ­ian cap­tives received bet­ter wages than the Indi­an ones. Indi­an pris­on­ers received between 20 to 60 % of a reg­u­lar West European’s wage and the east Euro­pean pris­on­er stood some­where in between (Hack­en­holz: 2004).

All cap­tives were indis­pens­able labour for the war indus­try and their loss was detri­men­tal to war effort. Not all cap­tives could remain fit for work in the long run. In Annaburg there were 6 report­ed deaths due to lung infec­tion, sui­cide, heart attack, abdom­i­nal dis­eases, and sim­i­lar unnat­ur­al rea­sons. Else­where, deaths were caused by depres­sion, schiz­o­phre­nia, sui­cide, exhaus­tion, ner­vous break-down and men­tal ill­ness in iso­lat­ed locations.

Though the affec­tive domain was all encom­pass­ing, its traces are more chal­leng­ing to find. The ITS records are dom­i­nat­ed by loom­ing silences and era­sure. I have relied on  snip­pets from the Sicher­heits­di­enst (SD) reports, mem­oirs and judi­cial records to recre­ate the world of cap­tiv­i­ty, which have been pub­lished else­where (Joshi: 2015). Here I will cite just one illus­tra­tive exam­ple, name­ly the fort­night­ly reports of the SD on the  mood and  morale of the gen­er­al pub­lic, com­piled and pub­lished by Heinz Bober­ach (Bober­ach: 1984). The SD observers were state appoint­ed ‘silent mass observers’, who con­stant­ly had their fin­ger on the pulse of the ordi­nary peo­ple, includ­ing the cap­tives. They record­ed dis­loy­al­ty, dis­gruntle­ment and grum­blings among the pop­u­la­tion so that appro­pri­ate mea­sures could be tak­en for the smooth func­tion­ing of the sys­tem. Unlike the quan­ti­ta­tive approach of the ITS, this SD obser­va­tion is full of vivid details on South Asian cap­tives’ deport­ment, behav­iour, and atti­tudes. These are the most colour­ful exam­ples in which pow­er hold­ers revealed their atti­tudes, bias­es, hope and fears. The SD report filed on 20 March 1944, starts with the fol­low­ing observation: 

The expe­ri­ence with Indi­an cap­tives is as neg­a­tive as with British POWs. They are unsuit­able for indus­tri­al and pro­fes­sion­al use and can only be employed either in dig­ging the earth (e.g. for air raid shel­ters) or as helpers in muni­tions firms. Their per­for­mance is so much below the low­est Ger­man aver­age that the firms soon look for replace­ment. They cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly refuse to work and invoke the Gene­va Con­ven­tion. Even the request to their super­vi­sors to exert an edu­ca­tion­al influ­ence is dis­missed with the remark that any puni­tive mea­sures would be use­less. If one con­fines them, they have the option of sleep­ing in arrest. Depriv­ing them of food sim­i­lar­ly brings them no great harm as they are abun­dant­ly sup­plied with Red Cross parcels and food pack­ets from home. This pas­sive atti­tude of the super­vi­sors extends to the entire con­tin­gent. Half of the con­tin­gent just looks on while the oth­er half digs the earth. Rather than keep­ing them­selves warm by work­ing, they pre­fer to freeze. They keep their hands per­pet­u­al­ly in their trousers’ pock­ets and cov­er their heads with shawls in such a man­ner that only their eyes and noses are vis­i­ble. Those who work pick just one-third of soil in their shov­el of what an aver­age work­er would (Bober­ach 1984: 6424–5).

While the SD obser­va­tions con­demn Indi­an cap­tives as shirk­ers and a finan­cial lia­bil­i­ty on the Reich, the pay­ment reg­is­ters of Faser­w­erk Müh­langer, sup­plied to the ITS team tell anoth­er sto­ry. One pay­ment list of 17 cap­tives shows that they worked on a Sun­day 11.7.43 (Pay­ment list of Indi­an POWs, 2.1.4.2/71044351). The IG Far­ben lists show that one Kalyan Singh worked for 10 hours per day for 2 weeks and 10 hours per day for 9 days in the rest of the two weeks in Feb­ru­ary 1945. This made it 230 hours in 28 days for which he got paid only 34 RM. The aver­age month­ly pay­ment for oth­ers was 22/23 RM. Anoth­er Karak Bahadur worked 10 hours per day, twice even 11 hours for the entire month of Feb­ru­ary 1945 and received 48 RMs for a total of 290 hours, one Dhan Bahadur worked for up to 12 hours, 5 days in week, 60 hours per week in the sec­ond week of Jan­u­ary, earn­ing 36 RMs for the month, for 245 hours of work. Why were they work­ing so hard in the bit­ter cold of Feb­ru­ary 1945? Earn­ing more would hard­ly have been an incen­tive as they were paid in coupons that were exchanged for food and for­bid­den exchange invit­ed fur­ther punishments.

Silences and era­sures notwith­stand­ing, the ITS hold­ings have a unique pur­pose and val­ue. They pro­vide us with lists of British-Indi­an sol­diers in large num­bers, with  names and iden­ti­fi­ca­tion details that might be dif­fi­cult to find in oth­er type of records gen­er­at­ed by Nazi offi­cial­dom such as decrees, com­mands and instruc­tions from the For­eign office. The same holds true for  media accounts, which most­ly report­ed the spec­tac­u­lar and news­wor­thy to cre­ate fear and alarm in order to ensure com­pli­ance, or  pro­pa­gan­da mate­r­i­al that was more of a pro­jec­tion rather than the real­i­ty of the camp uni­verse. The ITS hold­ings cov­er an exhaus­tive range of details con­nect­ed with iden­ti­fi­able indi­vid­u­als that his­to­ri­ans and researchers can fol­low up by look­ing at com­ple­men­tary sub­jec­tive doc­u­ments and oth­er instruc­tive mate­r­i­al in order to write a his­to­ry of the every­day life of British-Indi­an pris­on­ers in the Third Reich.

Bibliography

Bober­ach, Heinz, Mel­dun­gen aus dem Reich 1938–45. SD Berichte zu Inlands­fra­gen vom 27. Dezem­ber-20 1943 bis April 1944. Band 16. Herrsching, 1984.

Hack­en­holz, Dirk, Die Eleck­tro­chemis­chen­werke in Bit­ter­feld 1914–45: Ein Stan­dort der IG Far­ben. Mün­ster: Lit Ver­lag, 2004.

Joshi, Van­dana, “Shreds from the Lives of South Asian Pris­on­ers of War in Stamm­lagers, Arbeit­skom­man­dos, Lazaretts and Graves Dur­ing World War II (1939–45)”. Südasienchronik 5 (2015): S. 144–168. https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle‌/18452/9148/145.pdf?‌sequence=1&is‌Allowed=y

Oester­held, Joachim, “The Last Chap­ter of the Indi­an Legion”. Südasienchronik 5 (2015): pp. S. 120–143. https://‌edoc.hu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/18452/9147/121.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Scott, James, Dom­i­na­tion and the Arts of Resis­tance: Hid­den Tran­scripts. Yale: Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 1990.

Thomp­son, E.P., The Mak­ing of the Eng­lish Work­ing Class. New York: Pan­theon Books, 1964.

Van­dana Joshi, Sri Venkateswara Col­lege, Uni­ver­si­ty of Delhi

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