The Cutting Edge

adapted from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A bitter, public war has erupted between grass-roots Holocaust survivor organizations and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) over some sixteen miles of Holocaust-era records held by the International Tracing Service (ITS) at Bad Arolsen, Germany. The Bad Arolsen archive contains some 42 million records of the incarceration and enslavement of 17 million Nazi victims, about 70 percent of which are digitized and in many cases scanned by sophisticated optical character readers. Until recently, the files were secret.
A 2006 special treaty among the eleven nations of the International Tracing Commission that control the records will distribute copies to each country once approved. However, France and Italy have yet to ratify the treaty. Italian sources have gone on record to declare that their domestic treaty ratification process may take an additional year or two. That delay is heartbreaking to hundreds of thousands of elderly Holocaust survivors dying daily of old age and desperate to trace the fate of their loved ones.

But Bad Arolsen’s files could be made Internet ready within three to four months, say senior ITS technology officials. However, the USHMM, the prime mover in the international release, is intent on sequestering the data to its own on-site terminals in Washington instead of making them available on the Internet or via remote secure database accessible to survivors in local libraries or their homes the way most government documents are accessible these days. The Museum’s physical transfer approach involves a complicated, costly, time-consuming process of data exports, system reintegration and a computer infrastructure built from scratch.

The idea outrages Holocaust survivors.

“Where does the Museum get the chutzpah?” asked David Schaecter, president of the Miami-based Holocaust Survivors Foundation. He and other survivors assert that the Museum exploits its control of the collection to endlessly fundraise in their name. Klara Firestone, founding president of Second Generation Los Angeles, agrees, adding that the current Museum executives “have lost their sight and lost the soul of the Museum.”

In the process of defending their decision, Museum officials and their surrogates have spun any number of false statements and misinformation to uninformed, unsuspecting reporters of metro daily and Jewish weekly newspapers, Jewish communal leaders, and key Congressional staffers. They have misportrayed Red Cross officials as evil denizens obstructing the release process, quietly villianized French and Italian lawmakers, and told those unfamiliar with computer technology that the data is still plagued by almost insurmountable software problems, and is impossible to make Internet ready. What’s more, they have implied that the international treaty prohibits Internet access.

The opposite is true. Red Cross and Bad Arolsen officials are fervently working to make their records accessible as fast as possible. During a historic video and telephonic “Town Hall Meeting” of Holocaust survivors held June 18, 2007 at Nova Southeastern University, ITS director Reto Meister invited all to come to Bad Arolsen and access their personal files. The Town Hall Meeting was the first chance Bad Arolsen officials had to speak directly to survivors to dispel myths of non-cooperation and unworkable software.

In a subsequent series of conference calls with this reporter followed by an official written statement of technical specifications, Bad Arolsen chief technology officer Michael Hoffman and archivist Udo Yost explained exactly how their system works. Ten years in development, the Bad Arolsen system uses three interactive sets of prisoner informational data including TIFF and JPEG images of Nazi-era prisoner cards. Hoffman confirmed that given the correct name, birth date and birth city, “with a little luck, we get a hit on the full data set. If the system cannot get the correct information about a named individual on the first try, it defaults to the next probable hit using the sequence numbers, going through the candidate names.

Yost added: “If you are trained, it is quick, sometimes a matter of moments, maybe ten seconds, maybe one minute.” Yost has confirmed his system “does not need to be reinvented.”

A senior Red Cross technology officer was asked if placing the Bad Arolsen files on the Internet was legal and feasible. He immediately replied, “Of course.”

Indeed, all Bad Arolsen data files are now being exported to XML, the ideal Internet-ready data language now recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium, this in preparation for transfer to the USHMM.

Moreover, a Swiss Red Cross official revealed that in March 2007, France actually suggested to the Commission that Bad Arolsen place its files on the Internet or on a secure “virtual private network,” accessible by an unlimited number of terminals throughout the world. Later, the Internet idea was one of three technology options formally proposed by the Red Cross during the May 2007 Amsterdam conference of the eleven-member Commission.

Asked why the nations attending the Amsterdam conference chose not to place all on the files on Internet, a Red Cross official with direct access to the proceedings replied, “Don’t ask me. Technically it will feasible to access these databases from anywhere in the world. We would just export to XML format. We could then support a virtually unlimited number of remote terminals. Member countries would not receive copies—just access. This option was not taken.”

He continued, “Had they chosen the Internet option, the records would be accessible in a matter of months.” He added, “But our role is just to propose solutions…and not our role to judge them.”

Asked whether the Holocaust Museum supported the French proposal for Internet access, a key Commission official speaking on condition of anonymity declared cautiously, “Look, this entire process has been steered by one Organization and one country: The Holocaust Museum and America. You must ask them.”

However, Holocaust Museum spokesmen Andrew Hollinger and Arthur Berger, as well Paul Shapiro who leads the Museum’s Bad Arolsen project, repeatedly declined to be interviewed by this reporter.

It is time for Museum officials to come clean with the Congress, the media and the survivors. The Museum must face the technological facts and get those files up on either a secure or generally accessible Internet connection so the victims can see them. The miserable sagas contained within those files should not be used to create a greater box office at the Museum, but to help the victims rest in peace.

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Edwin Black, author of IBM and the Holocaust, has written numerous investigative articles on the Bad Arolsen collections and recently won an Integrity Award from survivors for his Bad Arolsen coverage.