Questions and answers

• Where was the document used and who created it?

  Under the USFET order issued by the Office of Military Government for Germany U.S. (OMGUS) on 8 January 1946, German authorities, companies, hospitals, social security institutions and other bodies in the US occupation zone (Bavaria, Hesse, Baden-Württemberg) were obliged to compile lists of all available information on foreign forced labourers, prisoners of war, German Jews and deceased concentration camp inmates. These lists were then to be handed over to the zonal traing bureaus of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) within specified deadlines.

  In Bavaria and Hesse, the German authorities were required to use special forms provided by the respective interior ministries in Munich and Wiesbaden as part of the foreigner search campaign. The lists completed by the authorities required to report were then to be handed over to the mayors (urban districts) and district administrators (rural districts), who had to check the material and then forward it to the responsible district presidents (Bavaria) or directly to the Ministry of the Interior (Hesse). From there, the material was then handed over to the zonal tracing bureaus in Munich (responsible for southern Bavaria), Ansbach (northern Bavaria) and Wiesbaden (Hesse).

• When was the document used?

  The implementation of the USFET order in Bavaria and Hesse began at municipal level in the spring of 1946. At first, there were apparently no strict formal requirements for the lists to be compiled. In Bavaria, this changed in July 1946 at the latest, after the reports received by the zonal tracing bureaus proved to be largely incomplete. The reports had to be repeated and the original deadlines extended. Municipalities and authorities were instructed to use eleven different forms (‘Form. 1-11’) for their reports, which were provided by the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior. If the forms provided were not sufficient, the notifications had to be made on lists according to the corresponding model. 

  By the spring of 1947, a large proportion of the requested documents had already been handed over in the four occupation zones. However, as there were still gaps in the files, in March 1947 UNRRA again asked the responsible German authorities to hand in documents. Presumably in this context, a form system was also introduced in Hesse, which was apparently very closely modelled on the Bavarian system and essentially differed from it only in that the eleven different types of form (‘Lists A-K’) were given different names.

  In the summer of 1948, the International Refugee Organisation (IRO), the successor organisation to UNRRA, issued a further and final call for documents. In the US occupation zone, the foreigner search campaign came to an end in 1950/1951. The zonal tracing bureaus were then dissolved and the documents collected there as part of the foreigner tracing campaign were transferred to the International Tracing Service (ITS, since 2019 Arolsen Archives) in Arolsen. The collective term ‘form lists’ subsequently became established among ITS employees for the lists taken over in this process.

• What was the document used for?

  Even during the war, the Allies realised that after the end of hostilities, millions of people would not know where their relatives were or whether they had survived forced labour, war captivity or concentration camp imprisonment. They therefore decided to set up tracing centres to collect information on non-German victims of Nazi persecution. Soon after the end of the war, many of the documents seized by the Allied forces in the liberated concentration camps (e.g. registry office cards) and the registration documents of displaced persons (e.g. DP 2 cards) were sent to the UNRRA tracing bureaus set up in the four occupation zones and later to the International Tracing Service (ITS, since 2019 Arolsen Archives). In addition, the Allied occupying powers issued orders around the turn of the year 1945/46 obliging German authorities, companies, hospitals, insurance institutions and other bodies to collect documents and information on the fate of civilian forced labourers, prisoners of war and deceased concentration camp inmates and hand them over to the zonal tracing bureaus.

  The USFET order issued in the US occupation zone, for example, instructed that ‘All German authorities within the US zone of occupation […] will immediately initiate appropriate action to obtain and report, within the time limits indicated, the information specified herein concerning all military and civilian personnel of the United Nations, who have entered the said zone after 2 September 1939, or who were residing therein on and after that date.' (6.1.1/82514693/ITS Digital Archive, Arolsen Archives). 

  The employees in the zonal tracing bureaus used the lists created in this context and the documents handed over to search for missing persons and clarify the unknown fates of those persecuted by the Nazis. At the same time, the documents were also used by the US military government to document Nazi forced labour and the associated crimes against civilian forced labourers and prisoners of war.

• How common is the document?

  In the Arolsen Archives, the lists originating from Bavaria, which were compiled as part of the foreigner search campaign on the basis of or modelled on form types 1 to 11, are now in sub-fonds 2.1.1.1. Their exact number is difficult to determine, but is likely to be around half a million. The Lists A-K from Hesse can be found in the same sub-fonds and total approximately 190,000.

• What should be considered when working with the document?

  Although the Allied orders of the four occupying powers were very similar in content and largely required the same information and types of documents, only in the US occupation zone was the creation of the lists formalised so strictly. In principle, the Bavarian form system was adopted in Hesse, although the eleven different types of form were not numbered from 1 to 11, but were labelled ‘List A’ to ‘List K’. Instead of being divided into ‘categories’, the forms in Hesse were equivalently divided into ‘levels’ I to III. In the American-occupied part of Baden-Württemberg, on the other hand, so-called search centre cards were used.

  If you have any further comments on this document, please send your feedback to eguide@arolsen-archives.org. The document descriptions in the e-Guide are regularly expanded - and the best way to do this is by pooling knowledge.