I’ve talked about how to find an individual in the WWII archives before, but new people keep asking me questions so let’s talk about it again.
The first thing that you, as a researcher, need to understand is that every archive has its own system for filing and cataloging documents. That system depends entirely on the individual history and mission of the archive.

Official government archives are meant to store government documents. They receive documents from every department of the government on a regular basis, store them, catalog them by ministry or department and by the date, and, usually, allow researchers to look at them. So they are pretty straight forward. You look for things according to the government department involved and the years involved.

Say the person you are interested in was arrested in France in 1943. The French had a ministry for war victims that created files for everyone who was arrested in France during the war and, until recently, administered pensions, benefits and the like. Its records happen to be in the French defense archives (service historique de la defense) in Caen. And they happen to be cataloged alphabetically by the individual’s name, which is the most user-friendly type of catalog around.

There are other archives, however, that are not official repositories of government documents. They tend to be more idiosyncratic. The most idiosyncratic of all has to be NIOD in Amsterdam. NIOD started out as a research institute meant to figure out what happened in the Netherlands during the war. It had government support but was not a government bureaucracy. It was also dealing in highly sensitive matters, such as collaboration and betrayal. The researchers at NIOD went out and gathered up papers and interviews and used them to write Loe de Jong’s massive Kingdom of the Netherlands during World War II. All those papers and interviews ended up filed away in a system that made sense to the original archivist but is far from clear to anyone else. It takes some doing to find things there.

Knowing something about the history of the archive will help you determine if it might have something relevant or not. Let’s go back to that person who was arrested in France in 1943. You should definitely look in the archive in Caen, but should you look at NIOD? No. Unless you know that that person was involved in the resistance in the Netherlands, perhaps before fleeing to France. Should you look at the documentation center at the Memorial de la Shoah in Paris? Only if the arrested person was Jewish, or possibly if he or she was involved in rescuing Jews. Because that archive is about the Holocaust. If the arrest wasn’t connected to it, that archive is very unlikely to have any information about it.

Next time: how to approach an archive.