Building a digital memorial

Why is it so important to digitize documents about Nazi persecution?

As the era of eyewitnesses comes to an end, the way we remember and commemorate the victims of Nazi persecution is changing. Today, we are no longer remembering personal experience, but history — and archives make that history accessible. This presents us with a tremendous opportunity and a clear mission, as writer Elie Wiesel put it, to let the documents speak. They must bear witness when the voices fall silent. These records tell of individual fates, of structures, and of historical contexts – they speak directly, are accessible to all, and can be verified by anyone willing to study them carefully.

At the same time, our role is expanding: education and outreach are becoming increasingly important – alongside the essential task of preserving the original documents, which remains as vital as ever. The big question, then, is not whether to digitize, but how. How can we ensure that digitization meets the needs of the public? How do we take advantage of technological advances while preserving the integrity of these unique sources? Because the opportunities are enormous: digitization allows us to make these documents accessible worldwide – around the clock and to people of all ages. We are creating new connections.

We provide context, guidance, and tools to aid understanding. This is urgently needed. Because these documents are much more than just paper. They are evidence. Testimonies to crimes. Voices of the victims. And today – in this era of disinformation, historical distortion, and Holocaust denial – they need to speak louder than ever. Digitization makes that possible. It allows us to create a digital memorial to the millions of victims. And it brings the truth about Nazi persecution into the heart of our society – a clear response to fake news and hate.

Were there any concerns about this strategy, particularly regarding the publication of sensitive personal data?

Yes, there were fundamental concerns – and in some cases outright resistance. In effect, the archive had been “closed” for decades. During that time, the public could not access the documents directly, and even researchers could only work with them to a very limited extent. Only staff were allowed to work with the original documents, and the organization’s internal processes were largely opaque to outsiders: Opening up the archive required a profound cultural shift: processes had to change, the demands on staff grew, and the institution’s own sense of identity also needed to realign. This transformation went hand in hand with digitization.

For many historians, online access to this new source was a hugely significant event – perhaps the most important development since 1990, when the archives behind the Iron Curtain were opened for the first time following the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Just imagine it: 30 million documents, including original records from the Nazi administration — a truly unique body of information. The role of research has also been redefined: not as an independent core task, but as a service for others, a source of inspiration for education, outreach, and historical analysis.

What about the concerns of the victims’ descendants and the general public?

In Europe — and in Germany in particular — much emphasis is placed on the idea that certain pieces of personal information should not be made public. This attitude is deeply rooted in European culture and continues to shape debates to this day. In Europe, concerns are often voiced that people could be unintentionally “outed” by information contained in our documents – for example, if the index card for a grandfather lists “homosexuality” as the reason for his incarceration and his family still lives in a small town. Another frequently cited example is when “work-shy” was recorded as the reason for incarcerating a person.

We must not forget that these terms are Nazi terminology – they were coined by an unjust system and require critical scrutiny today. Crucially, when anyone approaches us with a legitimate concern and requests that a specific document be removed, we respect their wishes and take the document offline within 24 hours.

We recognize that fears are often very real – especially among groups that continue to face discrimination today. For instance, when we return personal effects to families with a Roma or Sinti background, some do not want any publicity because they fear being stigmatized all over again. This shows how prejudice and marginalization continue to impact many people’s lives – and underscores the ongoing relevance of our work today.

After eight years, I am pleased to say that our online archive is used by millions of people all over the world – and thousands have expressed gratitude to us for giving them access to important information about their families. At the same time, in all these years only eight requests have been made for a document to be taken offline. Interestingly, four of these requests came from relatives of perpetrators.

Are the Arolsen Archives not bound by the GDPR?

The Arolsen Archives are not bound by the German Federal Data Protection Act, nor are they directly subject to the EU General Data Protection Regulation – at least as far as archival documents are concerned. Appropriate national regulations apply to the personal data of our staff, of course. But for historical documents, our own independent data protection policy applies, which was specifically developed to suit the character and mission of our institution.

We have created a solid and transparent framework of rules. These data protection guidelines are grounded in high ethical standards, but many European archivists consider them extremely liberal: in principle, any archival documents that are more than 25 years old can be made accessible to the public.

An independent Data Protection Board monitors compliance with these rules. This board serves not only as a supervisory body, but also as the point of contact for questions or complaints. It operates independently and reports exclusively to the International Commission, the governing body of the Arolsen Archives, rather than to the management. This ensures that transparency, data protection, and the process of coming to terms with the past are balanced responsibly.

How is the online archive being received? Who uses it today, and how?

Around 800,000 people from all over the world used the online archive of the Arolsen Archives this year. The numbers continue to rise, and the users are very diverse. Grandchildren who are looking for information about their families are one of the groups who use our online archive. A user from Israel once put it in these words: “It’s like a telescope pointed 2,000 kilometers away and 80 years into the past.”

Time and again, people tell me they have discovered something completely new about their family – and they are often deeply moved by what they find. Some describe the emotional impact of seeing a relative’s signature on a personal effects card – the last trace of a loved one. It’s about knowledge and discovery – and at the same time, about powerful emotions and a profound sense of kinship.

Another group of users consists of teachers and people involved in local initiatives who conduct research with volunteers or pupils. Their user experience – and their expectations – are quite different. For them, the focus is often on linking the past to the realities of their own lives – by researching people who used to live in the same street or community, for example. Teachers face the additional challenge of preparing this content so that it is understandable to their pupils and then integrating it into their lessons.

And the third major user group consists of colleagues from memorial sites and other educational institutions. For them, searching the online archive is often the first step in preparations for receiving visitor groups, processing inquiries, or providing support for educational programs.

This is the balancing act we face – meeting the needs of one-time users, who often have no prior knowledge, as well as those of experienced “super users,” who may well know more about the history of a particular place than we do ourselves. Our goal is to serve both groups effectively – our guiding principles are accessibility, contextualization, and service orientation.

How have the Arolsen Archives proceeded in recent years? What were the milestones in your digitization strategy?

Digitization can only succeed if it is embedded in a broader strategic framework. As I mentioned earlier, digitization has been a key part of a comprehensive transformation process at the Arolsen Archives, aimed at opening up the archive to the public in a way that is both effective and sustainable. On the technical side, a great deal of groundwork was required, including the development of a multi-year digital strategy. This was backed by reliable funding from the Federal Republic of Germany, with investments of around five to seven million euros spread over several years.  The strategy covers the development and launch of a new database, the implementation of a modern CRM system, and the adaptation of our working practices to international standards such as the ISO standards for digitization.

Another key element of our efforts was building up a strong network of partners. We were able to create the online archive very quickly because we could use technology provided by Yad Vashem – and we still rely on it today. We would never have achieved this goal so rapidly had we been forced to rely solely on our own resources. We have also benefited greatly from cooperating with other institutions and platforms. Our partnership with Ancestry is a good example. We provided large amounts of data, while Ancestry indexed the documents for us in return. As a result, millions of documents are now searchable online. Collaboration with the citizen science platform Zooniverse (Oxford University) was another important step that paved the way for the development of our own platform for the #everynamecounts crowdsourcing campaign.

For every milestone we have achieved so far, our approach has always been to experiment, test, adapt – and start over if necessary – without ruling out any option from the outset. The first step was scanning all 30 million documents, a process we began in the late 1990s already, to facilitate our own internal tracing work. We continued to advance this process in the following years. In 2019, parts of the collection went online for the first time – we were determined to make progress as quickly as possible. The next key milestone was tagging the documents, i.e. indexing their contents to enable targeted searches.

Around 40 million names are now searchable in the documents – a huge leap forward. Our crowdsourcing campaign #everynamecounts continues to play a key role in this work, with volunteers helping to transcribe documents and add keywords. We now use tools for automatic data capture as well, and they speed up the process significantly.

What are the next steps the Arolsen Archives will be taking in the area of digitization?

We are currently exploring whether artificial intelligence (AI) might help us gradually enrich our holdings with additional descriptions and contextual information or facilitate the development of new search functions that would allow documents to be searched using a wider range of criteria. The goal, in any case, is to make it even easier to find information in the world’s largest digital archive on the victims of Nazi persecution.

But the rise of AI also marks a new era. Large language models are changing the way we catalog, interpret, and make documents searchable. They can analyze content dynamically and reveal connections – quickly and in depth. But this power comes with risks: these systems rely on statistical probabilities and can sometimes generate inaccurate information. This can be particularly dangerous when dealing with historical facts, which is why it is not enough to demand ethical guidelines and transparent methods – although both these things remain important.  What really matters is that AI needs context. Language models must be supplied with reliable, verified information. And it is our responsibility to provide that context.

Intensive research into Nazi persecution has been going on for over 80 years now. A huge body of knowledge has been accumulated, ranging from broad historical analyses to highly specialized studies. Yet much of this work is only accessible to a small circle of scholars, historians, and the academically inclined. The wider public is largely excluded.

This is where one of the greatest opportunities for AI lies: in democratizing this knowledge. Making it accessible – not as impenetrable scholarly texts, but in a form that provides context and is easier to understand. Instead of countless people taking notes by hand, editing summaries, or curating cross-references, AI can perform these tasks for us – provided it is well trained and properly guided. This is not a distant vision, it is a concrete task we are faced with: the preparation of research, documents, and data so that they can be used by modern technologies – and made accessible to society. In this way, the knowledge they contain has an impact – and history stays alive.

When will the process of digitization be completed?

 The honest answer is that we will never truly be “finished.” For us, digitization is not a project with a defined end point, but an ongoing, dynamic process. We are a living archive. Our collections are growing constantly – thanks to international partnerships, newly accessible sources, and feedback from researchers. At the same time, technological progress is moving fast. Things that seem innovative today may already be outdated tomorrow. That is why we regularly adapt our systems and continually redefine our standards.

Linking our documents with information from outside the Arolsen Archives is an essential part of this process. The better we are able to connect different data sources, contextualize names, and piece together biographical fragments, the more life stories we will be able to reconstruct – and this lies at the very heart of our mission.