A Digital Monument in the Making

A behind-the-scenes look at our online archive

Millions of documents line the shelves of the Arolsen Archives – each file a piece of testimony, each list a potential clue, each copy a puzzle piece in the life story of a victim of Nazi persecution. These precious records serve as both a warning and a memorial. Our goal is to make them accessible to all. That is why we digitize and index these valuable documents, often with the help of cutting-edge technologies. Partnerships and collaboration with other organizations – and the hard work of our volunteers – bring us closer to achieving this goal.

Scanning, tagging, uploading

The online archive not only gives the public direct access to our collections, it also helps preserve the memory of the atrocities that were committed under Nazi rule. But what does digitization actually involve? For many decades, the staff of the Arolsen Archives spent most of their time handling tracing inquiries. But today, their tasks include preserving, scanning, indexing, and making the documents available in the online archive. Take a look behind the scenes.

Look behind the scenes
Photo: Greiner Napp

From fragile originals to valuable digital copies

Original prisoner records from concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau have been preserved in our archives for nearly eighty years. But they were not locked away in archive boxes – they were used on a daily basis for decades as vital tools and were handled thousands of times, putting them at risk of disintegration. To mitigate that risk, they were microfilmed early on. Some of the documents are currently being re-sorted and scanned to help us create a permanent digital monument. It will also enable us to preserve them better and harvest even more information.

Read the article

New technologies

Indexing our documentary holdings in full is a huge task. Extracting metadata from our documents used to be extremely time-consuming. But new technologies have changed all that. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and clustering can help in around 50 percent of cases. Michael Hoffmann, Head of the Processes and Quality Management unit, describes the challenges we face in an interview.

Go to the OCR interview
65th nationwide memorial seminar, photo: Elisa Oxe

AI helps reconstruct individual fates

Over a million lists are stored in the Arolsen Archives. The National Socialists used them in their perverse drive to perfect their system of persecution. Today, their meticulous records provide valuable additional information about the fates of individuals. But whose names are on which list? The Arolsen Archives now use artificial intelligence to help extract information about victims of Nazi persecution automatically from lists and link it with data contained in other documents. Each detail helps to reconstruct the path a person’s life took and the persecution they endured.

Read the AI article

Our volunteers

Our crowdsourcing project #everynamecounts has a key role to play in the creation of our digital monument. Since April 24, 2020, we have been appealing for volunteers to help digitize our documents and commemorate the victims and survivors of Nazi crimes in a new way. Digitizing these important records makes it possible for people from all over the world to access them. As the volume of fully indexed documents increases, the easier it becomes for relatives and researchers to search for names and information about individual experiences of persecution.

Go to #everynamecounts