WORK OF INTERNATIONAL TRACING SERVICE

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25970, 25 November 1949, Page 6

WORK OF INTERNATIONAL TRACING SERVICE

■ LOST CHILDREN of EUROPE

[By the Geneva Correspondent of “The Times”]

At the end of the Second World War hundreds of thousands of people had vanished and hundreds of thousands of ' relatives were seeking news of them. : So great was the volume of this de- : mand that a tracing office was set up ' under UNHRA where inquiries and information might be Many discoveries and reunions ware the result. In some cases it was alelief to know the sad truth. In others an important legal aspect arose such as proof of demise, so that court, could ; take decisions in wills or ownership oi (property or custodianship, or remar--0 Although there was then no conveni tion for the protection of International Committee of the Red Cross had already foreseen the pl ob lem of refugees and displaced persons, roughlv estimated at 30 000.000, and had realised that it would be one of the most difficult to solve after the war. During the period of forced labour transfers and m® movements of refugees, it collected a number of documents destined to be of vital importance m ■ suhscc| ,£,'2 searches. These were made available to the tracing staff of UNHRA. and between 19® and 1947 an orgMisation was roughed out for tracing the missing of allied nationalities and reuniting them with their families. * An Immense Task At Arolsen, North Hesse, a central bureau was set up which had the immense task of collecting the name rolls of inmates of the concentration camps and personal cards of displaced persons, card-indexing the information and sending it out to the national bureaux that had been formed in ail the countries occupied by the Germans. Arolsen was chosen because ot its accessibility to all four zones. When in 1947 UNRRA was oisbanded and the International Refugee Organisation set up. the Arolsen tracing centre "was taken over and became the International Tracing Service. Mr Maurice Thudicum. a Swiss who hid been head of the PrisOners-of-War Department of the Red Cross during the war, was appointed director-general. The fact that between 60 and 70 tons of documents relating to vrctfms of the Nazi regime have passed into the hands of the tracing organisation gives some idea of the dimensions of. the task. Every name in every list had to be indexed on a card, and often there had tc be more than one card to a single individual. The basic documents were the carefully kept lists-of Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, and other camps (though there were none from Auschwitz), ss well as factory workers’ lists, identity cards, and registers of deported persons. Unfortunately, the International Tracing Service has never had any access to the documents collected m the various Eastern European countries. There are at present some 6.000.000 cards in the master index and the intake is still about 300,000 cards a month. It constitutes the personal record of about 4.000,000 individuals and a mirror of all the archives of the war victims. “Meeting of Cards” Card-indexing and controlling on ihis scale is an expert job and, even with the right kind of personnel, requires a long period of training. The total staff of the organisation numbers nearly 16,000. Those in the British and United States zones are mainly engaged in local research in 34 dinerent towns. About 250 members of the staff are international officials of the 1.R.0. and 250 are local staff, mainly displaced persons with high qualifications. Of the rest about 50 per cent, are displaced persons and Germans, but as the resettlement of the former proceeds their proportion tends'to decrease. About 23 nationalities are represented. .- L • The German civil administration is responsible fot handing over to the International Tracing Service all names of non-Germans found in its material. This has resulted in the receipt of 460,000 names, of which 40,000 have needed special investigation. At first the German officials were reluctant to co-operate, fearing that the information might point towards their own responsibility, with perhaps unpleasant consequences; but they got over that. It has proved a valuable source of information,. relating as it does to hospital?, civil prisons, factories, social insurance, and the like. Owinq to confusion caused by the misspelling of foreign names in many of the German registers it was found necessary to adopt a phonetic system for the card-index, and special care has to oe taken in the case of persons of the same name. The service receives an average of about 4000 letters a month from all over Europe and beyond, and investigates some 6000 cases. \n ingenious system brings about what is called the "meeting of cards, whereby the names bf inquirers come automatically into contact '‘with those

of the inquired-for. Even this i. _ sufficient. It has to be the most painstaking inquiry hTV* search, correspondence, ragfc nouncement, and even cinema Search teams follow uo any clup'lnmost usual being a ‘last heard z address. Requests for information by tracing bureaux of other tries for documents giving inform*’ tion about their nationals neceaSSi the making of,a great many Child search is a separate branch the organisation, with its own kl? quarters at Geislingen. Of countries, Poland lost the grp?^ l number of children: altogether than 100,090 are still unaccounted 01 ? 1 * Czechoslovakia and Jugoslavia lost many. Five inquiries for children were received, of whom « was found, and 33 British child? ne have been located, the relatives found in nine cases. Quite affwti letters are received, written sorS? times in gratitude and sometimes £ anguish. The general task of th branch is to find children kidnannS by the Nazis, and all other non-G? man children displaced and unacccu* panied as a result of the war The method is to register all non German children under 17 W ho ar living in institutions or have hiU adopted or entrusted to the guanSu ship of German families. An sive search, in many cases involvS personal visits, has meant the siftm of the cases of 300.000 children ota nationalities. Five thousand new casJ have been discovered during the year. On the discovery of a chjLi/j non-German parentage the authoritiS of its country of origin are informed and the child welfare officers make investigation. In the earlier stage* th* child was removed from the GmS institution, but economic Germany have so far improved that there is no longer any need for thk on grounds of physical welfare and usually it remains where it is' unfit its future is decided. JLegacy of the U,a This work is only now reachrw fa full development. The number nt cases brought to a satisfactory solu. tion increases rapidly—especially the older cases—as new information comes to hand. But in view of the windine ' up of the 1.R.0., of which the International Tracing Service is a department, a decision has now to be taken whether the programme shall cease abruptly on December 31, whan funds will be alfnost exhausted, or can be passed on to some other child protection organisation. It is estimated that there will be 3000 to 5000 ifcteless children left at the end of the year their parents dr parentage sfill to be traced. They are a liability of the United Nations, on whom will rest the final decision. A proposal has been made that the International Tracing Service should be taken over by the Red Cross, as practically the only body having the machinery and experience necessary for carrying on the work. The records are likely to be needed for another guarter of a century at least—the led ross prisoner-of-war files of the Thret World War are still used to answer the questions of civil status—and since various laws for indemnifying the victims of Nazi action are now being prepared or promulgated, the demands for documents of proof are likely to increase rather than diminish. The present organisation can usually furnish proof regarding the fate of any allied national who was a prisoner of the Nazis, together with reasons for arrest and the date of release or demise. But the structure of the International Committee of the A Red Cross differs greatly from that rtf r a specialised agency of the United Nations. It is independent, neutral, and free to adopt its own methods, and it is not subject to political considerations. Moreover, child search does not come within the range of its normal activities, and it would be unwilling to tah;e over the branch on any terms. It might not even be the nflnt solution. since much of the work could not be carried on if the **** removed to some place -outswe Germany, t i These are questions that will nave to be answered soon. The legal and documentary side of the work gains m importance* the human side tends w diminish. The simpler cases of separation have tended to solve tn«9iseives. Some of the separated have rejoined one another through their own enor.s or through other agencies. There rave been strange instances, suchastw « two refugees, a mother and daugnxer, who sought one another, and were found by the card index to be 11'M in the same English town. finds in the dry pages of a geeem one ial report the poignant remark “there remains the need to aid -MW who still wait, still hope, or still. proof that the missing one wiu n” return."