The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and Footnote.com released the internet’s largest Interactive Holocaust Collection today. The collection can be viewed at www.footnote.com/holocaust. The collection has over one million Holocaust related records; including millions of names and 26,000 photos from the National Archives.
“We cannot afford to forget this period in our history” said Dr. Michael Kurtz, Assistant Archivist of the United States and author of America and the Return of Nazi Contraband: The Recovery of Europe’s Cultural Treasures. “Working with Footnote, these records will become more widely accessible, and will help people now and in the future learn more about the events and impact of the Holocaust.”
Included among the National Archives records available online at Footnote.com are:
- Concentration camp registers and documents from Dachau, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, and Flossenburg
- The “Ardelia Hall Collection” of records relating to the Nazi looting of Jewish possessions, including looted art
- Captured German records including deportation and death lists from concentration camps
- Nuernberg War Crimes Trial proceedings
The collection also includes nearly 600 interactive personal accounts of those who survived or perished in the Holocaust provided by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The project incorporates social networking tools that enable visitors to search for names and add photos, comments and stories, share their insights, and create pages to highlight their discoveries. There will be no charge to access and contribute to these personal pages.
Visit The Holocaust Collection for free in the month of October.
The publication of these monumentous records while invaluable to historians will go even further and document in a now publically accessible way to all of the peoples of the world just how horrific the suffering was and will go further to suppress revisionist history that would deny the tragedy of the Holocaust. To those who survive the atrocities this gives further validation on a personal level of their losses and those of their loved ones. To see the name of a loved one is indescribable. Thank you to all those who made these available.
Thank you for making these records accessible online.
At a time when some political leaders and others still deny that this horrific tragedy ever took place, these materials provide evidence of the atrocities and the places where they were carried out.