ITS employees wrote their initials (in this case, “Cu”) and the date on the back of the cards when they placed them in the postwar card file. Since the ITS was a tracing service, the central index was not left in its original order. Instead, ITS employees re-sorted the Central Committee cards in August and September 1954 using an alphabetical-phonetic system and placed them in a card file that now comprises a total of 3.5 million documents: the postwar card file (Nachkriegszeitkartei, Collection 3.1.1.1). This made it possible to quickly find multiple cards for a single person at once.