In our last post, we started talking about the importance of understanding the history and mission of an archive. Some archives, like the governmental archives, were simply gathered to store an organization’s history. In that case, you have to know what the organization did.

The Dutch Red Cross, for example, undertook the herculean task of interviewing everyone who returned from the Third Reich and cross filing all that information. They also set up a missing persons bureau, which meant they made index cards for every missing Dutch Jew. After they had figured out what happened to the Dutch population during the war, they put all the index cards, reports, lists and files in their archive, making it a treasure trove of information.

Given the cataclysmic upheaval of the war, it’s not surprising that there are official archives devoted to it. Every European country created institutes of some sort to study the war when it ended. These remained the exclusive preserve of an anointed few for many decades, but are now generally open. Although important, none of them is all-encompassing because they were all shaped by politics.

The Netherlands, for example, created the Royal Institute for War Documentation, now known as the National Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, aka NIOD. Originally, the institute collected documents about the Netherlands during the war, including conducting interviews with a view to writing a multi-volume history. The archive has amazing documents about WWII, but the catalog is notoriously opaque because it was organized by someone for the use of himself and his colleagues. He understood where everything was, but that knowledge died with him.  So it’s a little hard to find things there.  But they do have a terrific collection of wartime diaries donated by their authors that is well worth perusing.

The French organized their research differently by appointing official correspondents in each department. The correspondents gathered documents and conducted interviews, often in response to topics and questions coming from Paris. The correspondents’ personal collections are now in their departments’ archives. The contents and quality vary with the skill of the correspondent.
Other WWII archives represent efforts to understand the war as it affected particular groups of people or places. The trial of the notorious Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie in Lyon in the 1980s, for example, spurred the collection of interviews of his victims and other documents that are now part of the Center for the History of the Resistance and Deportation in Lyon. Its oral history collection is top-notch, but it was created too late to have an extensive collection of original wartime documents.

Holocaust museums often also have archives, or centers of documentation. In Paris the Mémorial de la Shoah has an archive that, like NIOD, has an idiosyncratic catalog. Such collections are often the result of gifts and acquisitions, making them incomplete.

Not every institute or museum has an archive, but it’s worth looking into if you are researching a particular place or particular people in that place. And whenever possible make friends with the archivist. Tell him or her what you’re looking for and ask for help. At the very least they’ll tell you where to look in the catalog.