Arolsen (DE)
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Bad Arolsen, until 1997 Arolsen, is a small town of some 15,000 in northern Hesse, Germany, in Waldeck-Frankenberg district. From 1655 until 1918 it served as the residence town of the Princes of Waldeck-Pyrmont and then until 1929 as the capital of the Waldeck Free State. It is situated roughly 45 km west of Kassel.
From 1918 to 1929 Arolsen was capital of the Free State of Waldeck-Pyrmont (after 1922: Free State of Waldeck), which was subsequently incorporated into Prussia.
Since 1946, Bad Arolsen has been headquarters to the International Tracing Service, an organization dedicated to finding missing civilians, typically lost to family and friends as a result of war or political unrest during World War II. The institution was led and administered until December 2012 by the International Committee of the Red Cross and funded by the Federal Republic of Germany; it is now administered by the Federal republic of Germany.
A venue for millions of documents related to the Nazi-attempted extermination of the Jewish people and others, the ITS[2] holds vast archives of Nazi-related documents. In April 2006, German justice minister Brigitte Zypries announced that Germany would cooperate with the United States and allow survivors and historians of the Holocaust access to 47 million pages of documents, although an eleven-nation accord had to decide unanimously that this was to be done. More than 12 million of the documents have now being digitally scanned and shared with research institutions around the world. The archive fully opened when France, Italy and Greece ratified changes to the access protocol. Information kept hidden from the public since its inception was finally opened to the public in November 2007.
Arolsen currently is assigned post code 34454.
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