65 years after WWII, a family blank is filled

Between 2006 and 2008, The Associated Press wrote extensive reports about a vast Red Cross archive of documents on millions of World War II victims. In one report, correspondent Arthur Max wrote about a Dutchman of whom virtually nothing was known beyond a few photos and personal effects in the archive. Nearly four years later he revisited the case.

[October 02, 2010]  AMERSFOORT, Netherlands (AP) -- As a child, Frank Seiffers didn't have a fond impression of his older cousin, Cornelis Brouwenstijn. He says he thought of the young man as something of a scoundrel.

Even after Brouwenstijn was arrested in World War II, disappeared into a German labor camp and died in the closing days of the conflict, Seiffers says he didn't give him much thought.

Then, earlier this year, he received a call saying that Brouwenstijn's personal effects were among the records of Nazi-era victims. Would he like to have them?

Seiffers found himself strangely moved when a Red Cross official opened a manila envelope and extracted a battered wallet, a small stack of family snapshots and a Dutch ID booklet for Cornelis Marinus Brouwenstijn.

One by one, 13 other families also received the effects of long-lost relatives after a brief ceremony Sept. 22 at Amersfoort, a transit camp in the eastern Netherlands through which 40,000 people -- many of them Jews condemned to extermination -- were dispatched to concentration camps in Germany or Poland.

Those 14 families are among the beneficiaries of a renewed effort, spurred by the opening of the archive after decades of secrecy, to fill in the many personal, individual blanks still left in the murderous record of the Nazi era 65 years after it ended.

"That's my face when I was young," Seiffers said after the ceremony, looking at the photograph in Brouwenstijn's ID booklet. There seemed little resemblance between the 73-year-old former civil servant and his square-jawed cousin, who was 22 when he died, yet it still astonished him.

"After 65 years -- wow!" he exclaimed.

Dutch researchers discovered Seiffers through a 2006 Associated Press report on the 3,500 parcels of belongings that remained unclaimed for more than half a century in the archive in a former Gestapo base in the German town of Bad Arolsen.

The packages are among some 50 million documents -- concentration camp registrations, transportation lists, medical records and other minutiae of mass persecution. In 1955 the archive was put under the administration of the International Tracing Service, an arm of the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross.

Over the years, ITS personnel used the records, containing information on 17.5 million people killed, missing, interned or displaced by the war, to act on requests for information from victims' relatives about missing individuals or from survivors seeking documentation to support reparations claims.

Responding to a campaign of many years, the 11 nations governing the archive ordered the files opened to victims' relatives and researchers in 2007.

Katrin Flor, communications director for the tracing service, said the unsealing of the archive was the key to finding many more relatives than its staff could ever locate on its own. It allowed people with local knowledge, language and contacts to join the hunt.

Groups from the Netherlands, Poland and France began contacting the archive, initiating their own searches in the vast warehouse of steel-gray cabinets and cardboard binders.

One group that has already reaped results is the October '44 Foundation, created in 1982 in the Dutch town of Putten to uncover the fate of 660 male townspeople arrested following a resistance attack on a German military vehicle. Most were sent to the forced labor camp at Neuengamme, in northern Germany.

Gert van Dompseler of the foundation gathered 90 Dutch names from a list of camp inmates whose effects were in the archive and has traced the families of more than 60 of them

"If we don't do this, no one will," he said of the time-consuming search. Three brothers of van Dompseler's grandfather perished in the war.

Van Dompseler and his friend Pieter Dekker worked mainly through the phone book, calling everyone with the family name of the person sought. Earlier this year they enlisted Internet-savvy Kitty Brom, who scoured city archives and cemetery records.

It was she who found Seiffers after reading the AP's reconstruction, fleshed out by studying Dutch records, of his cousin's life.

The AP found that Brouwenstijn's mother, Maria Johana Seiffers, had two children before she divorced her first husband, Cornelis Marinus Wimmers, and married Gerardus Brouwenstijn in 1937. Her son Cornelis, whom she called Nelus, took his stepfather's name.

Records show that Nelus went to a school for troubled or slow youngsters. Seiffers said he frequently got into trouble.

Brouwenstijn was arrested May 2, 1944, for hiding a radio in a suitcase, Seiffers said. Radios were outlawed because they could pick up broadcasts by the Dutch government-in-exile. He was jailed for six weeks in Amsterdam, then sent to Camp Amersfoort. On Sept. 8, 1944, he was put on a train for Germany.

His family never heard from him again.

After the war, his parents repeatedly asked the Dutch Red Cross for information. In May 1949 they received a terse reply that their son had died between April 19 and May 3, 1945, near Neuengamme, the labor camp to which the detainees from Putten also were sent.

The circumstances of his death were unconfirmed, but he likely was among the inmates evacuated from the camp as British troops were advancing. The camp commander gave the order that nothing was to be left when the British arrived. Documents were burned, and prisoners evacuated.

SS guards marched them to Lubeck on the Baltic coast and put some 8,000 inmates onto two ships, the Cap Arcona and the Thielbeck. On May 3, a British air force squadron, whose pilots knew nothing about the ships' human cargo, bombed and sank them.

Seiffers said he once asked his mother -- Brouwenstijn's aunt -- what happened to him. "She told me he was on a ship that sank."

In the courtyard of what is now a Dutch army camp and a World War II memorial, he thumbed through the photographs he had just been given. Though he couldn't identify anyone for sure, he said he was surprised at his reaction.

"It does more for me than I thought it would," he said.

[Associated Press; By ARTHUR MAX]

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.