The above quote, taken from Stone’s concluding chapter, neatly poses the question many historians have grappled with over the past seventeen years since the International Tracing Service (ITS) opened its doors to public scrutiny in 2007. Since that time, however, multiple historians have worked closely with the archive to understand their collections and shed light on aspects of wartime and postwar histories often thought to be irretrievable. Dan Stone’s book Fate Unknown is an impressively broad and deep study of the archive’s holdings which adds to existing knowledge about postwar histories, as well as wartime atrocities, and provides fascinating nuance about the stories of individuals, communities, and their place in reconstruction agendas.

The ITS, now renamed the Arolsen Archives, was created toward the end of the Second World War to trace people who went missing during the War and the Holocaust. As an organization, the ITS struggled to find its place among the multiple acronyms of postwar Europe and within the complex occupational structure. As Stone details in the first chapter, the veritable alphabet soup of organizations often had overlapping goals, organizational structures, and sometimes personnel. Ultimately, the structure and practice borrowed significantly from past tracing operations conducted by the Red Cross, and the ITS became a central point for tracing the missing across Europe.

Fate Unknown writes the familiar histories of postwar occupation alongside the unspoken and often silenced ones, while providing painstaking detail. The book, comprised of ten chapters, offers overviews of the overlapping, and competing, apparatus of international humanitarian organizations aiding the displaced alongside the formation of occupational forces. Yet, Stone has used the unique resources available through physical files in Arolsen, and the vast digitized database accessible from the Wiener Library in London, to map out the complexity of the postwar period by using individual stories to guide us—this is most keenly felt when bookending each chapter with the story of an individual or family unit. Although the method of using the micro to illustrate the macro is perhaps not new, the scale of research Stone has undertaken to also map the less well-known aspects of wartime and postwar histories is impressive.

As these histories are so complex, the first three chapters interestingly tell the relatively familiar stories within contemporary European history of creating the postwar framework and experiences of liberation. By the fourth chapter, however, Stone gets to the meat of the book, and although the description remains quite heavy (due to the vastness of postwar recovery operations), the scope of what can be discerned from the Arolsen archives becomes readily apparent. Within Holocaust historiography, death marches and liberation are frequently discussed, but postwar efforts to recover names from these marches and mass graves are not so well known. Stone’s description of the “Graves Recheck” program and the lengthy process of identifying the dead (Chapter 5) highlights the importance of this archive to postwar historiography. The ability to uncover what happened to these legions of lost souls relies heavily on eyewitness accounts from ordinary Germans who provided a variety of illustrations detailing mass graves, each emphasizing unique aspects of the topography. This rich archive within Arolsen allows us to not only understand the fragility of postwar recovery operations, least of all the need to maintain decent occupational relations, but the painstaking work involved when attempting to identify some of the final victims of the Nazi regime.

Chapters 6–8 focus on displaced persons (DPs), a special designation for refugees who were repatriated and resettled across the world and put under the care of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA, 1943-47). Stone again highlights some of the more widely discussed aspects, such as Resettlement schemes (281–296) alongside those which have rarely been considered in depth, such as losing trusted yet unqualified medical men, or Felczers, upon entering DP camps (277–8), caring for the elderly displaced (313–322), and the place of Sonderkommandos in the postwar world (322–337). Here, it’s important to note that he regularly highlights the need to use these sources in conjunction with others—and this is particularly true when discussing the Iron Guard, a group of Romanian fascists, who were held in camps across Germany (338–348).

Equally illuminating, however, is the relatively well-known discussion about Europe’s missing children (Chapter 8), and how these files can highlight not only individual agency but also the impact of increasing Cold War tensions. Between UNRRA and its successor organization the IRO (International Refugee Organization, 1947–1952), how and why children were repatriated to relatives, hometowns, or merely countries of birth depended heavily on man power, as well as which year repatriation attempts took place as the Cold War developed. Cases like those of a fourteen-year-old boy, Ludwig (Ludwik) Gasparic, show the vastness of some case files: by the end of his file, we have multiple back stories and admissions of falsifying details to improve his prospects mixed with worrying psychological and police reports which trace his trajectory from 1946 to 1960 across 13 countries (380–384). His case exemplifies not just how rich these files are and the impact of war on children and their development but also shows how to salvage snippets of refugee agency from traditionally oppressive files. The Arolsen Archives had become extremely important in this regard as new generations of scholars turn to the care and maintenance files (CM/1) to understand marginalized histories of displacement within the broader context of postwar reconstruction.

Although the vastness of the Arolsen Archives is well documented in the introduction to Stone’s book, there is also an appreciation of the scale of digitization being undertaken to ensure that these files are readily accessible. This is a particularly important feature of this modern archive as the doors remained closed to many historians, never mind the public, for the majority of the latter half of the twentieth century. A stark contrast to Germany’s increasingly open position to discuss the past, Stone laments the “increasing repression and a retreat into secrecy and silence” (395) which characterized the ITS’s management under the Red Cross until 2007. Stone has created an invaluable work that will help to guide many scholars in their research and familiarize them not only with the Arolsen Archive’s holdings, but also how to navigate them and use them alongside other sources to enrich our understanding of wartime experiences and postwar trajectories.