Red Cross files will spur Holocaust research

Posted Saturday, 18 November 2006, 08:10 HST @715

From Yahoo: The International Tracing Service, which is part of the International Red Cross, maintains an archive of documents related to the Holocaust.

Much of the material is recorded on 16 miles paper, contained in six buildings in Bad Aronson, Germany. Only 2 percent of the material is available to the public. Many of the records were retrieved from German government and military offices after the Nazis surrendered in 1945. Some of the archives include transcripts from Allied interrogations of collaborators and prisoners.

How detailed is this information? An entry about Anne Frank’s deportation from the Netherlands was found in these archives, according to this article in Time.

The service plans to convert some of the documents to digital formats over the next decade.

If you’re interested in the military history of information systems, read IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. While IBM’s management has continued to deny Black’s findings, the book presents a wide variety of evidence that IBM information systems and services were used by Nazi Germany to schedule and manage their war effort. The footnotes are compelling reading, and are quite authoritative.