COLUMN ONE

Holocaust Archivists Piece Together Bits of Lives

By Jeffrey Fleishman
Times Staff Writer

June 17, 2006

BAD AROLSEN, Germany — He was a Jew with missing teeth and flat feet. He was married with three children. He fixed heaters, wore reading glasses and wheezed with bronchitis. On March 28, 1943, he surrendered his trousers, winter coat, socks, slippers and shaving kit and stepped through the gates of Auschwitz.

The man known as Max C. is a ghost of pencil and ink, shreds of his memory preserved by the notations of those who made up the Nazi bureaucracy of death. These officers, guards and clerks logged the mundane and the mesmerizing across millions of pages, their meticulous keystrokes and ornate penmanship belying the brutality of their trade.

Max C.'s Auschwitz medical card listed a cursory history: hand injury, missed five days of concentration camp work, Dec. 31, 1943; open head wound, March 31, 1944; gangrene, May 16, 1944; virus, July 9, 1944.

He was transferred to Buchenwald. The last medical report is for a back injury on March 30, 1945 — two weeks before the camp was liberated. There is no mention of Max C. after that.

Such stories are stacked in files here at the Red Cross International Tracing Service, which houses one of the largest collections of documents on World War II concentration and slave labor camps. The service was founded in 1943 to search for missing persons. It has unearthed the facts and fates of millions of Nazi victims, and this year the organization is expected to open its archives to historians and scholars for the first time. A Times reporter was recently shown samples of the papers.

Jewish organizations and Holocaust survivors have long sought to study the 50 million documents and 17.5 million names of those considered undesirable by the Third Reich. But the tracing service, overseen by a commission representing 11 countries — including Germany, which has strict confidentiality laws — has restricted access for decades.

In April, Germany agreed to open the files, though questions about privacy are still being debated by the commission.

"Given the number of documents, I personally believe we'll have a new understanding of the Holocaust," said Deidre Berger, director of the American Jewish Committee in Berlin. "We'll see what the victims had to endure, and the details will sharpen the horror of what happened. Historical documents always cast new light."

Along rows of dull metal filing cabinets, past maps and artifacts, past sepia papers and brittle photographs, is a room where scanners click and spin, turning fading documents into computer bytes. The room is crowded with boxes, binders and shelves, and the paperwork seems as constant as ocean tides. The people working here don't look up much; their fingers are supple and quick, peeling away plastic coatings, gently smoothing crinkled edges.

Their sounds linger down the hall and into another room, where Gabriele Wilke spends her days cataloging in the section on concentration camps and deportations. She is a detective, twisting strands of symbols and words into short narratives.

She knows that a black upside-down triangle sewn on camp clothing signified a Gypsy; a pink triangle, a homosexual; a red one, a political prisoner; a star, a Jew. Her finger runs over lines of ink that dried more than half a century ago: A Slovakian Jew, born in 1923, died of pneumonia in Auschwitz at 8:40 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1942.

"It's a special thing to touch such an original document," she said. "After a while you develop a routine and it's work, but every now and then something jumps out and touches you. I do this person the best favor I can if I can say I found something, if I have some piece of evidence. Nothing is more sad than closing a file that says, 'Nothing Found.' I have been not only amazed by the amount of paperwork the Nazis kept, but by the meticulousness of it."

Every year the service accumulates thousands of new files, many of them combed from archives and folders in the former East Bloc. The Red Cross has responded to more than 11 million requests from 62 countries since documents seized by Allies at the end of World War II were first stored in a former Nazi SS barracks in this Baroque spa town. The center had 151,000 queries last year, many of them from former slave laborers with compensation claims or children and grandchildren of Nazi victims seeking to construct mosaics of lost lives.

"The Nazis documented any tiny thing," said Maria Raabe, who has worked at the service for 36 years. "For some concentration camps we have all the names but not all the documents. In parts of Eastern Europe we have very little. We have almost no documentation from the Nazi-run camp Gross-Rosen. But what we do have from there are documents specifying how many lice were found on inmates' heads, and this may be the only paperwork to show that this person was here when."

A page in the Gross-Rosen entry reads: "Lice List, Block 8, 886 prisoners, 12/20/1944." Fifteen lice were found on the heads of 11 inmates; each inmate's name is listed along with the number of insects plucked from him. There is nothing else on the page, which lies in a cabinet next to a small box holding a silver pocket watch, a few rings, a cigarette case with faded engraving, trinkets pulled from dirt and ash.

An inmate number and a handful of letters on a sheet of paper make the composite of a life: "Russian woman, 43 years old. Catholic. Worked as employee. Died, 9:10 a.m. of flu and weak heart. Auschwitz."

Another page, more fragments: the dental history of an inmate at Buchenwald, a red mark near each of the four lower teeth worked on in 1944. Another page holds scrawled markings and dates of medical experiments at Dachau. Another page, titled "Unknown Russians," notes the fate of 11 people, such as death by suffocation and a crushed skull on May 28, 1944.

Shaded by oaks and set behind a bike path, the service's main office, which has housed the archives since 1952, has many windows and looks like a hotel. Walking through rooms of binders and encroaching paperwork, one is struck by all that is still unknown about the lives that disappeared and the enormity of what took them. Similar details taken from all those killed around the world in terrorist attacks since 2001 would fill a small fraction of this space.

Opening the files may divulge secrets and lies; the Nazis often embedded slander within their paperwork. There also may be references to inmates who acted as informers and conspirators to survive amid the mud, frost and smoke of the camps. Such potential information, emerging decades later in a different world, may not provide an accurate picture of the pressures and fears many faced. It is one reason countries such as Germany and Italy have stressed confidentiality when rousing the past.

"Painful choices had to be made in those days of life and death," said Berger. "These files will help us humanize them."

Wolfgang Luckey, a red-faced man with a light mustache, distills and deciphers for the service's central name database. The 10 or so languages he deals with — a reflection of the sweep of the Nazi regime — have the universal tongue of phonetics applied to them, allowing Slav, German, Russian, Italian, French and other surnames to be transliterated by Red Cross archivists into a common spelling.

"W" means "V." "Z" means "S." There are six pages of such rules. Each has to be mastered by the staff so a name doesn't slip into obscurity. Alexander, for example, can be spelled in different ways, and to further complicate matters, Alexander in Russian can also mean Sasha. Imagine a French clerk at a Nazi deportation center taking down the name of a Polish man with Bosnian ancestry and having that later respelled by a German guard at a concentration camp.

Luckey turned to one of the cards he was working on: A man who arrived in Buchenwald on Sept. 27, 1944, has his name spelled four ways.

"It's a soup of letters," he said. "The worst is the old German penmanship. We didn't learn it in school, and it's very elaborate and difficult to read."

Luckey's fingers ripple like water over the keyboard, his eyes darting from document to computer screen.

The last of the Holocaust survivors are dying. There's much mystery; a person born in 1920 could be alive today, but he also could have died in the camps, or deliberately disappeared after the war, not wanting to remember.

It's this uncertainty that bothers Luckey and the others here.

Raabe recalls a Gypsy name she found in a file from Auschwitz. She tracked it to another name and then to another and another, going from generation to generation. She realized, she said, that emerging on the pages before her was the sparse bookkeeping of a family's annihilation.

"It really shocks you sometimes," she said. "But this is my job. One has to be very precise. If you don't give everything, the consequences could be devastating. It could mean that the survivor of a slave labor camp won't get his pension."

The file for inmate Heinrich D. was clear. Born in 1902, he had an oval face, brown eyes, a big nose and ears close to his head. He was thin; a scar ran on the left side of his throat. On Nov. 27, 1937, he was sent to Buchenwald on a charge of treason. Two cufflinks, two collar buttons and a comb were confiscated. He remained in the camp until the end of World War II. He was interviewed by U.S. troops, who typed up a report.

Heinrich D. said the Nazis gave him "25 strokes [of a lash] for laziness. The leader of the [camp's] political department tried to use me as a spy." On April 25, 1945, he signed a document to collect his personal belongings.

"This is an ideal case," Wilke said. "There's a paper trail."

The trail lengthens daily. The tracing service receives the equivalent of 400 yards of files each year. Clues can be a shred of paper, a ripped card, a torn folder, anything with a scribble. They can be well preserved, as if a clerk had gone for coffee and left his work on his desk. That's how it seems in the room where scanners click and hum.

A cardboard ledger with a taped cover, its pages aged but crisp, was opened. It listed, in the immaculate arched flow of a fountain pen, 1,283 names of inmates who died at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria between 1939 and the beginning of 1944.

It wasn't a complete list of those who died in the camp; it was only the names of "lazy people." Other books held other names.

 

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