The Archivists of Containment: The International Tracing Service and Postwar Order

In 1951, as deliberations lingered about the fate of the International Tracing Service, an organization originally established by the Allies to locate and reunite victims of Nazism, an internal note from the West German government explored the feasibility of American plans to transfer its management to the Federal Republic. Although American officials heralded this idea as a vehicle to demonstrate West Germany’s commitment to atoning for the Third Reich’s crimes as well as grease the wheels for the so-called Westbindung, which would bind the nascent state to democratic—and anti-Soviet— principles, their West German counterparts expressed skepticism. The note’s author worried that the American scheme would not win the Federal republic “any reputation” because the ITS “is [a] three power affair, with heavy political influence against the East.”

This paper explores how the ITS and its archive, which publicly touted its universal and humanitarian services, became a proxy battleground of the Cold War. I examine how its management and staff understood not only the organization’s official mandate, but also the vicissitudes of the directives from its oversight body, the International Commission, which were meant to ensure that states aligned with the Soviet Union received no information or documentation from the archive. Ultimately, I argue, ITS personnel, who were rarely trained in archival sciences, became “archivists of containment” who reinforced Cold War borders and the postwar order and stoked hostilities along the East-West divide.