The Holocaust

Surveys vital resources for researching the victims of the Holocaust

The Allied liberation of the concentration camps 75 years ago caused shockwaves that still reverberate today. Sadly the coronavirus pandemic curtailed many public events to remember the millions of victims who were imprisoned, exploited and murdered by the Nazis, but these have been replaced by online exhibitions, commemorations and digital projects.

Many of the websites listed this month have been created by decades-old institutions devoted to recording what happened to the victims of the regime. The Every Name Counts project will be part of our Transcription Tuesday event on 2 February (see next month’s issue for further details).

We also have a site recommended by Jeanette Rosenberg OBE, family history representative on the UK’s International Tracing Service Oversight Committee, whose parents are Holocaust survivors. Indeed on her blog ( round2itgenealogy.wordpress.com) you can read about the 80th anniversary of the deportation of her father, Leo Rosenberg, from Bruchsal on 22 October 1940.

AROLSEN ARCHIVES

w arolsen-archives.org/en

The German town of Bad Arolsen holds the world’s largest archive on the victims and survivors of the Nazis, with information on about 17.5 million people, comprising some 30 million original documents. The archive (formerly the International Tracing Service archive) opened for research in 2007. A great deal of the material is already available to search for free via collections.arolsen-archives.org. The focus to date has been on collections of “particular public interest”, namely records from concentration camps and ghettos, as well as educational material, such as documents relating to death marches, which can be searched using maps. Via the ‘General Inventory’ section, you can learn more about documents that are not yet in the online archive.

YAD VASHEM

w yvng.yadvashem.org

For some 70 years Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, has been working to recover the names of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust. The website hosts the Shoah Victims’ Names Recovery Project, which aims to memorialise each murdered Jew by recording their name, biographical details and photograph on special ‘Pages of Testimony’ forms. Ultimately this is seeking to expand on the 4.8 million victims who are already documented in the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names. This sits alongside an online photo archive, a documents archive, an online catalogue, a deportation database and survivor testimonies.

THE UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM

w ushmm.org

The website of the official US memorial to the Holocaust in Washington DC includes all sorts of fascinating online exhibitions. The highlight from a research perspective is the Database of Holocaust Survivor and Victim Names, which contains records of persecuted populations during the Second World War. It includes Jews, Roma and Sinti, Poles and other Slavic peoples, as well as Soviet prisoners of war, people with disabilities, political prisoners, leaders of trade unions, the clergy, homosexuals and criminals. The site also hosts the long-running Remember Me project ( rememberme. ushmm.org), which aims to identify young people who survived the Holocaust.