Research Resources: New Online Tool Allows Searching For Information About Auschwitz Victims and Transports to the Camp

From the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum:

On victims.auschwitz.org, you can search for information about people deported to the German Nazi camp Auschwitz, as well as learn details about most transports to the camp. Currently, it contains data on 1,187 transports and 265,702 people, based on approximately 1 million document entries.

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“Restoring and presenting the identities of victims of Auschwitz is an extremely important part of our mission. The SS men stripped the victims of their humanity, but also – by destroying the evidence of crimes – they tried to erase their identities. For the camp administrations victims were just numbers. For us, they all had their own name, face and history. Victims.auschwitz.org is much more than just a research tool. In fact, it is a step-by-step construction of a memorial to the victims of Auschwitz, which not only allows us to see individual people, but also – by showing the transport system – illustrates the monstrous scale of the terror system of Nazi Germany,” said the Museum Director Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński.

“The new website is a result of many years of work by our team of archivists and historians. We are able to use this modern tool largely due to the work done as part of the project “Resorting the identities of those deported and imprisoned in KL Auschwitz”. Part of our mission aims at preserving the memory of all those deported and imprisoned in the camp, meaning it is not only important for us to study archival documents, but also to make them available. I am greatly hopeful that it will not only serve researchers, but also those who want to learn and talk about the tragic fate of people in Auschwitz,” said Rafał Pióro, Museum Deputy Director, responsible, among other things, for projects carried out in the Archives.

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The data comes from many archival sources and scientific studies. These include, among others: the numbered lists of transports incoming to KL Auschwitz Nummernwerzeichnis, information from Auschwitz Chronicle 1939-1945 by Danuta Czech, How many people died in KL Auschwitz by Franciszek Piper, lists of Jews transported from occupied France by Serge Klarsfeld, or publication by Ward Adriaens, Dr. Maxime Steinberg, Dr. Laurence Schram, Patricia Ramet, Eric Hautermann and Ilse Marquenie Mecheln-Auschwitz 1942-1944: The destruction of the Jews and Gypsies from Belgium. Data about the deported Jews from Hungary comes from memoirs collected by Prof. R. Braham, letters of the prisoner Leo Glaser, or lists of transports prepared by Mikulas Gaško compiled by Dr. Piotr Setkiewicz, head of the Museum Research Center.

“To the new system we also added data about transports from five districts in occupied Poland, which were gathered in the Memorial Books of Poles deported to KL Auschwitz published between 2000 and 2013,” added Ewa Bazan.

Learn More, Read the Complete Release

Direct to victims.auschwitz.org

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Data Files, News