From the forerunners of document collection to the trial of Klaus Barbie and beyond: the transitional justice journey of the Izieu telegram

This article analyses the journey of the so-called Izieu telegram - a telegram sent by Nazi perpetrator Klaus Barbie to report the raid of a Jewish children's home in France to his superiors - from its creation to its use in multiple transitional justice mechanisms, including an international military tribunal, domestic trials in France, and various memorialisation projects. In doing so we apply the concepts of activation and the records continuum approach, both borrowed from archival studies scholarship, to analyse how an individual record becomes continuously recontextualised through its use in transitional justice processes and in the process contributes to those same processes. We conclude by highlighting both the benefits of bringing archival concepts into dialogue with transitional justice scholarship and practice, and the tensions inherent in that endeavour.