There was an interesting story on MPBN today about a Maine man's search for information on his German grandfather, who died in a concentration camp during World War II. He was able to track him down with the help of the Red Cross.

Which is where Morgan Bickerstaff enters our story. She works for the Red Cross in Portland. "Every request starts and ends with the local chapter," Bickerstaff says. "A caseworker, who's usually a volunteer, will take as much information as is known, pertinent family members, the place that people were last known to be, where they may have been traveling to at the time. The caseworkers send that information to our national headquarters office and then, from there, it's vetted, it's sent, in this case to the Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center in Baltimore. It's broadened out to our network at that point. We have over 180 countries participating in Red Cross. So then those networks are used to get more information, in this case usually from archives and museums, particularly in Germany, Poland, and Israel."

MPBN's Flickr photostream has shots of some of the documents Bob Lane was able to obtain:

• Otto Rupp's Registration Card from Buchenwald Concentration
• Otto Rupp's Personal Sheet from Buchenwald Concentration Camp
• Otto Rupp's Personal Sheet # 2 From Buchenwald Concentration Camp
• Otto Rupp's Death Certificate from Hamburg Germany

Update (1/20/2010): And here's the second part of the story.