The Arolsen Archives has collected and housed more than 30 million documents over the years on the people who fell victim to Nazi persecution during WWII. It is the largest archive of Holocaust victims in the world. Recently, they partnered with Ancestry.com (the genealogy and DNA testing company) in order to digitize and publish all of their records on the internet. Through this collaboration, all those millions of documents are now available to the public for free!
An Ancestry representative said:
The release of this record collection is part of Ancestry’s philanthropic initiative to make culturally important records available to everyone. And not only are the records free, but the company has also donated digitized copies to the Arolsen Archives, Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and other entities to post on their websites as well.
The documents include passenger lists of displaced persons, registers of people living in Germany who were persecuted by public institutions and corporations, Holocaust survivors and former concentration camp inmates, who left ports and airports in Germany and other parts of Europe from 1946 to 1971, even burial information for the deceased, and more. It even includes records of millions of people with non-German citizenship who were incarcerated in camps or otherwise living in Germany and German-occupied territories from 1939 to 1947. All of it can be seen on the Ancestry website.
“Every American Jew has people they lost,” Rachel Silverman, a private genealogist specializing in Jewish family history who was enthusiastic about the development said. “It’s just the matter of the degree of separation.” However, for the records to be useful you’d have to already have an inkling or know the name of who you are looking for because the records will not tell people who they lost in the Holocaust. Rather, the records give details about a ‘who’ in question. For instance, the records could provide additional hints as to why a relative took one escape route instead of another.
Ms. Silverman said:
In genealogy, the almighty why is the hardest. Why did my family end up in Atlanta when they were from the small town in Germany? When we find out how travel was arranged, that might open new doors.
In the past, people would have to travel to an archive in person, usually having to fly there, in order to find information about their family. Now, through this website, they can do it in their pajamas sitting on their couch.
Also, all the original archived documents are of paper, which will eventually degrade and the information will be lost. This is what inspired Arolsen Archives to digitize its archive in the first place – it was their desire to preserve and make sure all their information would still be available for future generations.
“It is more important than ever to show what can happen if these values about solidarity, about equality, about respect are not upheld,” Arolsen Archive Director Floriane Azoulay told Great Big Story. You can hear more about what she has to say in the video below.
