Help Build a Digital Monument
The Arolsen Archives are appealing for people to take part in the online project “Every Name Counts”
The Arolsen Archives are building the world’s largest online archive with information on the victims of Nazism. The crowdsourcing project “Every Name Counts” calls for volunteers to enter names found on documents into the online archive to ensure that they will never be forgotten.
Bad Arolsen – The COVID-19 pandemic makes it impossible for people to come together as they have done in the past to take part in joint acts of remembrance: It has become necessary to cancel many memorial ceremonies involving the laying of wreaths and visits to memorial sites that were planned long in advance to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps and the end of the Second World War. This is why the Arolsen Archives have chosen this time to offer a new form of remembrance which is open to all.
“Every Name Counts” – a digital and participative project of remembrance
On April 24 2020, the Arolsen Archives are launching “Every Name Counts”, a crowdsourcing project which encourages us all to remember the victims and survivors of Nazi crimes in a new way: by digitizing the names on documents from concentration camps and deportation lists to make it possible for people from all over the world who are searching for information to find these names in an online archive. Every list that is processed in this way expands the database which currently holds 26 million documents. Around 500,000 users have already searched the online archive for information about individual people. This goes to show that people all over the world are still looking for information about relatives who experienced persecution. Because their fates are often still unknown.
4 steps, 5 minutes – Join in!
Four steps and five minutes are all it takes before volunteers can start entering names in the database: Open the project page, select a document, read the helpful hints, and off you go. It takes about 30 minutes to transcribe a list. Participants are encouraged to use their social media channels to share one of the names from the list(s) they are working on, adding the hashtag #everynamecounts. The aim is to make as many people as possible aware of the crowdsourcing project over the next few days.
The names will never be forgotten, it will always be possible to find them
The Arolsen Archives want to digitize all the names in their historical collection of documents by 2025 so that they can be found online. “We need a lot of volunteers to achieve our goal. But participating in the “Every Name Counts” project does not just help us digitize our documents,” emphasizes Floriane Azoulay, Director of the Arolsen Archives. “Every list that is transcribed, every name that is digitized is an expression of solidarity with the victims of the crimes committed by the Nazis and carries with it the promise that we will never forget.”
More information about the project “Every Name Counts” also on our social media channels:
