- Legal Status
- Permanent Collection
- Provenance
- Records created by the the Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit (IDO)-Sektion fűr Rasse-und Volkstumforschung between 1940-1944 in Southern Poland. In 1944, when the advancing Soviet Red Army forced an evacuation of the Sektion and most of its materials to Bavaria. After the War, the United States and British Armies, with the authority of a number of Allied Control Council Orders including Number 4 of May 13, 1946, seized Nazi documents that were deemed important for prosecuting war criminals or containing propaganda regarding Nazi racial theories, including those in this collection; the Pentagon took possession of the IDO-SRV papers. After the U.S. Army had determined the IDO-SRV papers were of no value for medical intelligence purposes, they were given to the Smithsonian as a “federal institution specializing in [anthropology],” on “permanent loan.” The IDO-SRV records were formally accessioned as number 176333 on May 27, 1947 by Dale Stewart, the head curator of the Anthropology Department. NAA archivist Jim Glenn included the IDO-SRV collection in the NAA Collection Guide beginning in 1989, but the collection was not fully processed for research use until 1998, when Gretchen Schafft and Gerhard Zeidler arranged and described it. Over the years, parts of the IDO-SRV collection were de-accessioned from the Smithsonian and transferred to other institutions. The IDO-SRV personnel records were returned to the Pentagon by the Smithsonian prior to accessioning because they were deemed non-scientific in nature; the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) eventually maintained them. Artwork was transferred to the National Gallery and Dumbarton Oaks. The materials at NARA were repatriated to the German Bundesarchiv in the 1950s; it is planned that they will eventually be transferred from the Bundesarchiv to the Jagiellonian University Archives, where another portion of the IDO records have remained since the war. In the fall of 2003, the Polish government formally requested the transfer of the Smithsonian’s IDO-SRV materials to the Jagiellonian University Archives. A task force, established by Christián Samper (Director of the National Museum of Natural History), chaired by Edie Hedlin (Director of the Smithsonian Institution Archives) and including Jake Homiak (Director of the NAA), Alan Bain (senior archivist at the SIA), Elaine Johnston (Office of the Smithsonian General Counsel), and Ruth Selig (Special Assistant to the Director of the National Museum of Natural History), studied the request. After consulting with anthropologists and legal advisors, the Task Force recommended that the IDO-SRV collection be transferred to Poland with the caveat that a digital surrogate of the entire collection remain in the Smithsonian National Anthropological Archives. Samper formally announced the decision in late September 2004. Generous support of the Jagiellonian University Archives and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum made the preparation for and digitization of the collection possible. The collection was prepared for digitization beginning in the fall of 2006; the original collection was returned to Jagiellonian University in the fall of 2007.The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives received the digitized collection in Aug. 2008.
