LONDON – The British public will soon be able to access digital records from the
Holocaust containing 50 million digital records and covering 17.5 million people
from the archive of the International Tracing Service (ITS).
Available
for the first time, the digital archive will be available free of charge at the
Wiener Library (
www.wienerlibrary.co.uk) in London, the world’s oldest
Holocaust memorial institution. The library already hosts the UK’s largest
collection of personal papers and testimonies of refugees and Holocaust
survivors.
The ITS archive contains records from concentration, slave
labor and displaced persons’ camps from the Naziera, World War II and the 10
years that followed.
“The ITS archive is hugely significant,” Foreign
Secretary William Hague said ahead of the UK launch.
“Allowing the
British public access to the archive in the UK for the first time will enable
Holocaust survivors, refugees and their descendants to obtain information about
the fate of their relatives who suffered at the hands of the Nazis.
“It
will also provide an invaluable collection of primary source material for
UK-based academic researchers and students, and is further proof of the UK’s
active approach to preserving the memory of the Holocaust.”
Anne Webber,
chairwoman of the ITS Stakeholder Group said: “It has long been an urgent
humanitarian need for people in the UK to have the opportunity to discover the
fate of their loved ones, even at this late hour.
“Since the archive has
opened, brothers have found sisters; sons have found mothers, each of whom had
never known the other had survived. This is the foremost collection of material
on the Holocaust and its aftermath, and having a copy in the UK will provide
scholars and educators with a vital resource to research, study and teach one of
the defining episodes in human history,” Webber said.