1945 Central Tracing Bureau CDPX Displaced Person Family Service Archive WWII US For Sale

For your consideration is an exceptionally significant three-part U.S. occupation-era displaced-person tracing file dating from 315 September 1945, centered upon the establishment of an organized Enquiry Service for United Nations Displaced Persons and Persons Assimilated to Them in Status in Germany. The principal memorandum was issued on 3 September 1945 by the Combined Displaced Persons Executive (CDPX), c/o G-5 Division, USFET, and directed to the Eastern and Western Military Districts. It announces that the Central Tracing Bureau was then in a position to receive inquiries from displaced persons seeking information concerning close relatives outside Germany, and orders the use of standardized application forms and instructions for that purpose. The accompanying instructions, headed Enquiries about Relatives outside Germany, define who could make inquiries, which relatives could be sought, and how applications were to be completed, translated, and transmitted.
The document is particularly important because it belongs to the formative months of the tracing organization that became the direct institutional predecessor of the later International Tracing Service at Arolsen, today the Arolsen Archives. Archival histories confirm that after SHAEF was dissolved in July 1945, responsibility for tracing displaced persons passed to the Combined Displaced Persons Executive, which established the Central Records Office and Central Tracing Bureau; by September 1945, tracing work was being transferred into the UNRRA framework. The Arolsen Archives themselves identify September 1945 as the period in which the military governments transferred administration of the Central Tracing Bureau to UNRRA in Frankfurt-Hchst, making this memorandum contemporaneous with the institutional birth of the tracing service that ultimately evolved into the modern Arolsen Archives.
The memorandum states explicitly that the purpose of the Enquiry Service was to help displaced persons re-establish contact with relatives while awaiting repatriation or resettlement and thereby improve morale. The accompanying Annex A restricts inquiries primarily to close relativesfather, mother, husband, wife, child, brother, or sisterand requires use of a standardized application form, preferably completed in English or otherwise in the applicants original language. The surviving group also includes a 15 September 1945 Seventh Army/Western Military District forwarding memorandum, issued under file AG 383.7 CA, directing that additional copies of Annexes A and B be reproduced locally and distributed through Military Government detachments. That forwarding sheet bears the typed authentication of Dean G. Ostrum, Captain, AGD, Assistant Adjutant General, while the principal CDPX memorandum bears the typed authorization of Brigadier General S. R. Mickelson, Chief, U.S. Zone, CDPX.
Produced in period stencil-mimeograph format and preserved with original fastening, monospaced type, official routing language, age toning, and handling wear, the group is an unusually compelling primary-source record of the earliest organized Allied effort to reconnect families scattered across postwar Europe. Its significance extends well beyond ordinary displaced-person administration: it documents the operational beginnings of the Central Tracing Bureau, an institution whose records became one of the worlds principal documentary archives for tracing missing persons, forced laborers, concentration-camp prisoners, refugees, and displaced families. The Arolsen Archives confirms that CDPX records specifically include material concerning the search for relatives of DPs in assembly centers, while later Central Tracing Bureau records continued precisely this mission.