Israel is set to assume the one-year rotating chairmanship of the International Commission (IC) of the Arolsen Archives in June 2027, one of the largest archives on all things WWII.
The IC, which governs the International Tracing Service (ITS) behind the Arolsen Archives, comprises 11 states: Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Each country holds the chairmanship for one year before passing it to the next in rotation.
The Arolsen Archives trace back to 1943, when the British Red Cross set up a tracing office to help locate people scattered by Nazi persecution and forced labor across occupied Europe.
As WWII came to an end, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) took over the responsibility for this work, before the operation relocated to Bad Arolsen, Germany, in 1946.
Israel’s relationship with the archives
Israel has been a member of the IC since the post-WWII period. Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial, has held copies of ITS documents since the 1950s.
In 2025, the Arolsen Archives partnered with Israel’s Central Zionist Archive to digitize over 1300 child tracing files, records originally created for unaccompanied Jewish children after the war, many of whom emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine and whose case files traveled with them.
When UNRRA ceased operations in June 1947, the Preparatory Commission of the International Refugee Organization (IRO) took over the Central Tracing Bureau, which was formally named the International Tracing Service (ITS), in 1948. The ITS was then run by the IRO until 1951.
Under the Bonn Agreements in 1951, the Federal Republic of Germany funded the ITS, with daily management being under the control of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
The ICRC managed the ITS for over half a century until 2012, when it withdrew, and the German Federal Archives took over as institutional partner.
The ITS remained closed to the public for nearly 25 years after its founding, until it opened in November 2007, following public criticism from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum over the ITS and the ICRC’s lack of cooperation in opening the records.
Alleged misconduct by Arlosen's management
In 2019, it was renamed the Arolsen Archives, International Center on Nazi Persecution. Today it holds roughly 30 million documents on about 17.5 million victims and survivors of Nazi persecution and is listed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register.
In 2023, IC members and Germany's Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media received an anonymous letter alleging misconduct by Arolsen's management.
The IC commissioned an independent investigation by the Göhmann law firm. The resulting report exonerated management, finding no violations of labor or criminal law, though it noted a need to rebuild trust between staff and leadership.
Both the IC and Arolsen's directorate issued statements affirming confidence in the institution moving forward.