Half-sisters Helen Schaller and Sula Miller would never have met if it were not for the Arolsen Archives.
Only recently did German Schaller and American Miller learn that they had a father, a Holocaust survivor who immigrated to the United States.
Floriane Azoulay, director of the Arolsen Archives, the largest collection of data on Nazi victims and survivors worldwide, stated that Miller “contacted us because she was looking for information on her father.”
Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Mendel Mueller was a Jew who was imprisoned in two Nazi concentration camps: Auschwitz in what was then occupied Poland and Buchenwald in northern Germany.
He had another daughter, Helen, who was still alive and residing in Germany, according to an examination of the records.
“The two women came to know each other because of us,” Azoulay stated.
People throughout the world are still learning what happened to their family members who were taken to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi execution camps, eight decades after World War II ended.
Millions of records and artifacts can be found at the enormous Arolsen Archives, which are situated in the charming spa town of Bad Arolsen in central Germany.
Researchers discovered a 1951 letter from Miller’s father’s wife asking where he was when she phoned the archive to inquire about her father.
Mueller married a German shortly after the war, and the two had a daughter, Helen, who was born in 1947.
However, a while later, he moved to the United States without her, married an Austrian, and they had a child together, Sula, in 1960.
The two sisters first met last year after Bad Arolsen investigators were able to locate Helen four years after Miller’s original inquiry.
According to Azoulay, “their physical likeness was startling.”
Despite having divergent and complex opinions on their father, she claimed that “their meeting helped them make peace with the past.”
Rings, wallets, and watches
The Arolsen Archive still holds almost 30 million original papers on nearly 17.5 million people, despite the fact that 90% of its holdings have now been digitized.
Additionally, thousands of objects, including wallets, rings, and watches, have been gathered from the former Nazi camps.
In order to assist people in locating family members who had vanished during the war, the Allies established the International Tracing Service in early 1946.
In addition to Roma, homosexuals, political dissidents, and “racially pure” youngsters abducted by the Nazis as part of a program to combat the declining birth rate, it primarily dealt with Jews.
Bad Arolsen was selected due to its location in the middle of Germany’s four occupation zones (French, American, British, and Soviet), its ability to withstand Allied bombing, and its operational telephone network.
The ceremony was initially conducted by a peculiar combination of Germans, including former Nazi party members, Holocaust survivors from all around Europe, and members of the Allied forces.
However, as more of the survivors departed the nation, the number of German employees rose starting in the 1950s.
With the help of over 50 volunteers worldwide, the archive currently employs about 200 people.
According to Azoulay, it continues to receive about 20,000 inquiries annually, most of which are from survivors’ or victims’ children or grandchildren who are curious about their fate.
similar to Abraham Ben, who was born in May 1947 at a camp for displaced people in Bamberg, southern Germany, to Polish-Jewish parents.
No grandparents
Ben, who is now nearly 80, is still trying to find out what happened to his father’s family, who were abandoned when he fled the Warsaw Ghetto.
According to him, “there is a great possibility that they died in the camps.”
We never questioned Ben’s father about the Holocaust, and he never discussed it. We thought it hurt too much for him.
In the Jewish refugee center where Ben was born, almost no one had grandparents since the elderly, who were too frail to work, were the first to perish in the camps.
“When I was ten years old, I realized that other kids had grandparents since I attended a German school and my classmates would talk about the Christmas presents they received.”
Ben stated that he hopes to locate “cousins who may have survived” among his father’s five siblings’ offspring.
Nazi party records, including Gestapo arrest warrants, lists of individuals to be sent to the camps, and camp registers, are kept in the archives in Bad Arolsen.
Considering the slim odds of survival for the individuals included, the documents are frequently remarkably thorough.
Every prisoner’s height, eye and hair color, facial features, marital status, children, religion, and languages spoken, together with their name, date of birth, and deportation number, were recorded in the camp register in Buchenwald.
“The most amazing day of her life”
Because different languages can have different spellings of the same name, the records were initially arranged using a phonetic alphabet.
According to Nicole Dominicus, head of archive administration, “‘Abrahamovicz’ can be written in almost 800 different ways.”
Later, the archives were enlarged to contain correspondence between the Red Cross and the Nazi government as well as information acquired by the Allies.
Letters from persons looking for missing family members are also included in the folders.
A mother who survived Auschwitz writes to the International Tracing Service in 1948 to inquire about her daughter, whom she lost while in the camp.
In other countries, volunteers who work for the archives outside of Germany also assist with searching through records.
A volunteer in Poland named Manuela Golc recently met with a 93-year-old woman to give her a watch and a pair of earrings that had belonged to her mother, who was deported in 1944 following the Warsaw Uprising.
Golc stated, “She told me it was the finest day of her life,” as she shed tears.
Achim Werner, a 58-year-old German, was “shocked” to get a call from the archives informing him that his grandfather’s wedding ring had been removed from him upon his arrival in the Dachau concentration camp.
Unaware that his grandfather had been detained there, Werner had made multiple trips to the camp outside of Munich as a child and as an adult.
His statement was, “We knew that he was arrested in 1940, but nothing after that.”
Werner has no idea why his grandfather was put in jail, and he probably never will because there is no further information on him in the archives.
However, he has given his daughter the wedding ring in an effort to preserve the man’s memories.
He stated, “She will pass it on to her offspring after wearing it as a pendant.”
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