Richard Ehrlich: The Arolsen Holocaust Archive

Description

The Arolsen Holocaust Archive chronicles the history of the Nazi repository of voluminous prisoner records from World War II, capturing in excruciating exactitude the Nazi campaign to murder millions and eradicate European Jewry. Located in Bad Arolsen, Germany, and under the auspices of the International Red Cross, the International Tracing Service (ITS) was renamed the Arolsen Archives - International Center on Nazi Prosecution in 2019 and is one of the largest Holocaust archives in the world. The repository holds 17.5 million name cards, over 50 million documents and more than 16 miles of records and artifacts-all of which were out of reach for both survivors and scholars from its founding in 1943 until the ITS's opening to the public in 2007. Ehrlich is the first to record the interiors of the archives through photography, and thus to preserve the unspeakable atrocities it contains; his project forms part of permanent collections including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Notable images include documentation of Schindler's List, Anne Frank's transport papers to Bergen-Belsen, as well as minute details of prisoner exploitation.

Born in New York in 1938, Richard Ehrlich is a surgeon and photographer. His photographs are held in the permanent collections of institutions including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, UCLA Hammer Museum, George Eastman House, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Denver Art Museum and Santa Barbara Museum of Art. He has held over 35 exhibitions and his publications include Anatomia Digitale (2009), The Other Side of the Sky (2014), and Face the Music published by Steidl in 2016. Ehrlich is Professor Emeritus of Urological Surgery at the Center for the Health Sciences at UCLA in Los Angeles. Manfred Heiting is a designer and editor of photo publications and a collector of photobooks focusing on the period between 1886 and 1980. He has designed and edited extensive surveys of German, Soviet, Japanese and Czech photobooks, as well as Dr. Paul Wolff & Alfred Tritschler. The Printed Images 1906-2019 (2020)-all published by Steidl. Heiting is currently working on an overview of Dutch photobooks.