Nazi Archives Documented in Powerful Portfolio by Photographer Richard Ehrlich

Richard Ehrlich’s photographs of the Holocaust Archives

More than half a century has passed since the Holocaust — enough time to digest a plethora of scholarship, museum exhibitions, monuments, documentaries and artistic reckonings — but still not enough time to understand. Into this mix, we can now add Richard Ehrlich’s photographs. His portfolio of the Holocaust Archives at the International Tracing Service at Bad Arolsen illustrates the Nazi bureaucracy with images at once artistic and chilling.

Created in two visits in 2007, Ehrlich’s portfolio contains 52 color, digital images. The complete portfolio is already in a number of public collections, including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.; Yad Vashem in Jerusalem; the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaisme in Paris; the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University; and the Special Collections of the UCLA Young Research Library.

The work was first publicly exhibited at American Jewish Committee’s Annual Meeting in May 2008, where it was viewed by over 1,000 people, including members of Congress, foreign dignitaries and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. The portfolio will next be exhibited at the Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica, California from August 26–30, 2008, where it will be co-sponsored by AJC Los Angeles and the German Consulate and German Information Center. Says Seth Brysk, Executive Director, AJC Los Angeles, “I am pleased the relationship with Rick will continue in Los Angeles.” A free, public opening reception is set for Tuesday, August 26 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., where Christian Stocks, Consul General of Germany, will speak.

The portfolio will also be included in the exhibition “Of Life and Loss,” opening October 26, 2008 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Jewish Federation of Santa Barbara. Additional exhibitions are planned at Cornell University’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum; the University at Buffalo Art Gallery, State University of New York; and the Musée du Judaisme in Paris. Éditions de La Martinière will publish the portfolio in book form.

The Holocaust Archives at the International Tracing Service, Bad Arolsen

With archives of some 50 million documents, the International Tracing Service (ITS) has played an important role in historical research, family reunification, refugee services, and in tracing the fates of countless individuals. Although it has been active since 1943, the ITS has maintained a low profile, in consideration of the privacy of the more than 17.5 million people in its Central Name Index. Occupying six buildings — including a former SS barracks — in Bad Arolsen, Germany, the ITS archives contain more than 16 miles of records and artifacts that reveal, with excruciating exactitude, the Nazi campaign to murder millions and eradicate European Jewry and other minorities.

Having read a short article about the ITS in the International Herald Tribune, Richard Ehrlich, a surgeon with a growing reputation as a photographer, pulled out all stops to gain access to the Bad Arolsen collection. When his initial request was denied, he explains, “I called anyone who might have influence and finally found a sympathetic official in the State Department.” In two visits totaling seven days in June and September 2007, Ehrlich completed this compelling portfolio. In bringing these images to the public forum, Ehrlich recreates his own shocking and ultimately numbing encounter with the “banality of evil.”

Through Ehrlich’s lens, we see the obsessive mentality of the Nazi bureaucracy—countless aisles of catalog drawers, towering stacks of paperwork, row upon row of file folders. At a time of resurging Holocaust denial, these folders, storage boxes and ledgers — the normally mundane paraphernalia of record keeping — provide painful and irrefutable evidence of history’s most unimaginable crime.

The records in the ITS archives were collected from a number of sources, including the Gestapo, ghettos, prison camps and every agency of Nazi authority. Among the many individual documents depicted in the portfolio are the original Schindler’s list, a transport order to Bergen Belsen including Anne Frank’s name, and an invitation from Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich to a brunch meeting to discuss “a total solution to the Jewish question in Europe.” Through Ehrlich’s photographs, we can read entries in the Buchenwald prisoner logs and death book, study the Nazis’ elaborate system for coding prisoners in charts and maps, read of a precise, every-two-minute shooting Himmler ordered in honor of Hitler’s birthday, and view medical records that count the lice removed from prisoners.

Richard Ehrlich’s interest in photography began as a child growing up in the northern suburbs of New York City. He postponed photography for almost 40 years to build a surgical practice in Los Angeles, limiting his picture taking to a visual record of his work in the operating room. Seven years ago, he renewed his devotion to photography and soon received acclaim for his work. California painter Tony Berlant describes Ehrlich’s photography as “…technically precise, yet soaringly evocative in content.”

Working in series that focus primarily on natural landscapes, architecture and his world travels, Ehrlich has created a substantial body of work. Wherever he directs his lens, Ehrlich’s keen eye elicits a resonant sense of place, as may be seen in his portrayal of his local turf, Homage to Rothko: Malibu Skies. Ehrlich’s photographs have been acquired by many museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the UCLA Hammer Museum and the Denver Art Museum. He is represented by a number of prestigious galleries, including Bonni Benrubi, New York City; Fay Gold, Atlanta; Weston, Carmel, CA; and Craig Krull, Santa Monica. Richard Ehrlich’s photographs of I.M. Pei’s Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center were published in 2007, and Nazraeli Press has published a volume of his images, Namibia: The Forbidden Zone (2007). Nazraeli will publish Ehrlich’s The Body as Art: The Art of the Body in 2009.

artdaily

A closely guarded Holocaust archive opens its doors

Like other Holocaust victims, Noemi Ban has gone back numerous times to survey the ghostly field of chimneys at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi concentration camp in Poland where she and her family arrived in July 1944, and she alone survived.

But last May, Ban got an even more jolting glimpse into her past, when she visited the Holocaust archive in this tranquil town in central Germany. There, filed in the labyrinthine shelves of records, was a faded scrap of paper that she remembers signing on the day she arrived at the camp from Hungary.

"I was shocked to see my handwriting," Ban, 84, said by telephone from her home in Bellingham, Washington State. "When I signed it, I had no idea why. Why they needed such precise data in that horrible place is amazing."

The Nazis kept meticulous records of their mass extermination during World War II, and much of it ended up here, in a closely guarded archive maintained by the International Tracing Service, which is administered by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Now, after more than six decades, the tracing service is opening its vast repository of information - not just to survivors like Ban, who have long had the right to see material here, but to scholars who are eager to plumb its depths for fresh insights into an unfathomable horror.

On Aug. 20, the archive plans to transfer digital copies of the first major trove of documents to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and to the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem.

The files cover 51 concentration camps and prisons, and include transportation lists, medical reports, entry documents - like the one signed by Ban - and Gestapo prison records. About 10 million documents in all, they will represent a third of the entire collection at Bad Arolsen.

Prying open the doors of Bad Arolsen has been a lengthy, politically fraught process, and it is not completely finished. Three of the 11 countries that oversee the institution have not yet ratified an amended treaty that would give historians unfettered access to the archive.

In May, though, the 11 countries, among them Germany and the United States, agreed to begin the electronic transfer even before the last three countries - Italy, France, and Greece - ratify the treaty.

"We have interpreted the decision in a way that there is no turning back," Reto Meister, the director of the tracing service, said. "It became very evident that the ITS had to change because the victims wanted it to change."

A tall, rangy Swiss national who has spent his career in places like Iraq and Lebanon for the Red Cross, Meister has made it his mission to dispel Bad Arolsen's reputation as a secret Nazi archive - a characterization he contends was always a bit exaggerated.

Outside experts on the Holocaust, who have long pushed for more access, said he had been remarkably successful.

"I have a good deal of admiration for how far he's moved the place," said Paul Shapiro, the director of advanced Holocaust studies at the museum in Washington. "He's dealing with a staff that, for a very long time, operated in a closed and secretive manner. He also has to balance multiple forces."

Among those is the German government, which pays nearly $20 million a year for the upkeep of the tracing service and its 320 employees. Until last year, Germany opposed granting wider access to the archive, contending that it would violate privacy standards.

The documents include confidential personal information, like reports of medical experiments carried out on prisoners, and accusations of murder and homosexuality made by the Nazis to discredit people.

Much of the material was discovered by Allied forces when they liberated the camps at the end of World War II. They dumped the files in a complex of vacated SS barracks in Bad Arolsen, which was conveniently located near the border dividing the U.S. and British occupation zones.

Few historians doubt there is a wealth of dramatic, wrenching personal stories in the archives. Shapiro said he expected enormous interest from researchers, who previously had to rely on documents in government archives in Washington, London and Moscow, which focused less on individual victims than on the Nazi system.

Among the files on displaced persons here is a sheaf of drawings and illustrations by a Latvian refugee who was conscripted into the German Army in 1944 and ordered to dig trenches in Germany.

Among those watching Bad Arolsen most closely are lawyers for Holocaust victims and their relatives. They cited the archive this year in opposing a settlement with an Italian insurer, Assicurazioni Generali, over unpaid claims on life insurance policies.

As part of the settlement in February, Generali agreed to give heirs of Holocaust victims until next August to uncover evidence of unpaid claims at Bad Arolsen. Officials there said no one had made inquiries.

The complexity of the archive, combined with the flood of inquiries, resulted in a huge backlog of requests - 450,000 at its peak earlier in the decade, causing a wait of several years for a response. The backlog is now down to 75,000, but officials say new requests are answered within eight weeks.

As records are transmitted to Washington and Jerusalem, part of this research burden will shift to the Holocaust Museum and Yad Vashem. Shapiro said he expected a wave of inquiries. Some survivors have already complained that the museum is playing a gatekeeper role.

While it would have been nice to wait for new technology to organize the archive, Shapiro said, the advancing age of Holocaust survivors - many are over 80 - makes it vital to answer requests as soon as possible. "That's a big job, but it's one we're committed to doing," he said.

International Herald Tribune

Eleven-nation panel of nazi archive meets

The governing commission of a long-closed Nazi archive convened Monday to decide when and how to make its vast treasure of wartime documents accessible for the first time to historians.

The two-day annual meeting of the 11-nation commission, held at a 15th-century cloister in central Amsterdam, will cap a yearlong process to pry open the files of the International Tracing Service.

With the horror of the Holocaust still fresh, the files were sealed under a 1955 treaty for fear that unrestricted access to personal histories would violate the memory of the dead and the reputations of the survivors. They also were subject to German privacy laws. The files, maintained in Bad Arolsen, Germany, were used by the Red Cross mainly to trace missing people and later to validate restitution claims.

After years of pressure from survivor organizations, the commission voted last year to distribute digitally scanned copies of the documents to member states for research purposes.

The decision was cheered by survivors and relatives as potentially breaking the bottleneck in responding to their queries for information about Nazi persecutions. But it required ratification by all 11 nations - a process taking longer than anticipated. Seven countries have endorsed the treaty amendments - the United States, Israel, Poland, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Britain. Ratification is still pending by Luxembourg, Greece, Italy and France.

The commission was considering a proposal to begin transferring scanned documents to research institutions under embargo until the ratification is complete, said a statement by the archive's management. Even then, access to the records will be limited under the terms of last year's agreement, which stipulated a single copy would be made available to each member state for use "on the premises of an appropriate archival repository."

Each government was expected to take into account "the sensitivity of certain information" the files may contain, the agreement said.

Several survivor organizations in the United States reportedly were objecting to the restricted access, saying the files should be available on the Internet and open to everyone. Only the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem have requested copies.

Reto Meister, the archive's director, said all documents relating to concentration camp internment and deportations have been scanned and indexed - about two-thirds of the estimated 30 million to 50 million pages. The archive also has a collection of postwar files on millions of displaced persons.

The documents "offer a unique window into that black chapter of recent history," he said in a statement. "Behind each record is a personal story that puts a face on the suffering caused by Nazi persecution."

Associated Press