[4] In 1943, the international section of the British Red Cross was asked by the Headquarters of the Allied Forces to set up a registration and tracing service for missing people.
The organization was formalized under the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces and named the Central Tracing Bureau on February 15, 1944.
The Bonn Agreement of 1955 (which stated that no data that could harm the former Nazi victims or their families should be published) and their amendment protocols dating from 2006 provided the legal foundation of the International Tracing Service.
[5] Tracing missing persons, clarifying people's fates, providing family members with information,[6] also for compensation and pension matters, have been the principal tasks of the ITS since its beginning.
[6] The service operates under the legal authority of the Berlin Agreements from December 2011 and is funded by the government of Germany.
[9] After the end of the Second World War the main task of the ITS was initially to conduct a search for the survivors of Nazi persecution and their family-members.
These include certification of the forms persecution took, confirmation for pension and compensation payments, allowing victims and their family members to inspect copies of the original documents and enabling the following generations to find out what happened to their forebears.
[citation needed] During the compensation phase of Eastern European forced labourers through the "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future" Foundation between 2000 and 2007, around 950,000 enquiries were sent to the Tracing Service.
[citation needed] ITS's total inventory comprises 26,000 linear metres of original documents from the Nazi era and post-war period, 232,710 meters of microfilm and more than 106,870 microfiches.
In addition to this there are smaller sections associated with the work of a tracing service: the alphabetical-phonetic Central Name Index, the child search archives and the correspondence files.
To date, the arrangement of the documents having been collected over a period of six decades was subject to the requirements of a tracing service, which brought families together and clarified the fates of individuals.
The goal is to compile finding aids that can be accessed and published online and are based on international archival standards.
However, since the Declaration was made, there had been little practical change in the operations of the ITS, despite repeated negotiations between the ITS, ICRC, and various Jewish and Holocaust survivor advocacy groups.
A critical press release from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum written in March 2006 charged that "In practice, however, the ITS and the ICRC have consistently refused to cooperate with the International Commission board and have kept the archive closed.
"[20] In early 2006, several newspaper articles also raised questions about the quality of the ITS' management and the underlying reasons for the existing backlog.
[25] Associated Press (AP) reporters who were given access to ITS files found a carton of documents related to an escapee program run by the Truman Administration.
The AP reporters used these files and declassified US documents to describe how the United States asked the ITS to run background checks on escapees from Eastern Europe.
The Central Intelligence Agency reviewed their histories and then recruited some of them to return to their countries of origin, to spy for the United States.
The program did not return very much useful intelligence, because these recruits, motivated to impress their handlers, supplied information that was not reliable, and because by 1952, the Soviets had largely exposed these efforts.