From the Arsolen Archives:
After the Second World War, the Allied occupying powers were faced with a mammoth task: they wanted to document the crimes committed by the National Socialists and search for missing persons. In order to do so, they collected information about the victims of Nazi persecution. In the American Zone of Occupation alone, this resulted in the creation of around 850,000 documents containing information on ten million names. The Arolsen Archives have now put this collection of documents online.
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Rebecca Boehling, Acting Director of the National Institute for Holocaust Documentation at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, underlines the importance of this collection: “Because the American Zone was the largest occupation zone of the WWII Allies, information regarding those millions persecuted by the Nazi regime, who were registered there immediately following the end of the war, is of exceptional significance for the search for missing persons and for determining the path of persecution of both survivors and those whose lives were stolen. This new online access to these documents will make available an immense amount of information about survivors and victims of the death marches and concentration camps as well as about forced labor.”
To make sure the new information can be accessed quickly and easily, the Arolsen Archives enlisted the support of Ancestry, the largest online platform for genealogical research. This year the company began helping to process large collections, making the data available to the Arolsen Archives as well as publishing the documents in its own online archive. Because of this, the lists can now be searched very easily. “The data collected by Ancestry enrich our online archive with a lot of valuable information, including information on the whereabouts of foreign forced laborers, for example,” explains Giora Zwilling, Head of Archival Description at the Arolsen Archives.
Read the Complete Announcement
Direct to Access: Online Archive of the Arolsen Archives
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