The #everynamecounts challenge: More than 15,000 volunteers took part
We recently announced an #everynamecounts challenge for the week of International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2023 and appealed to the public to help us complete it. The goal of the challenge was to digitize the names of 30,000 former prisoners from the Stutthof concentration camp as well as information about their path of persecution in the space of one week. And the ultimate purpose was to make the data accessible to people all over the world in our online archive. The response was overwhelming.
Thank you to everyone who gave a few minutes or a few hours of their time to take part in the 2023 #everynamecounts challenge. Thanks to the help of over 15,000 volunteers from all over the world, we have achieved the goal we set for the challenge. In fact, we have now managed to digitize the names of almost 70,000 victims of Nazi persecution recorded on documents from various concentration camps and from a search index from the early post-war period. Assuming it takes an average of three minutes to process each document, volunteers have donated 10,500 hours of their time to us! (Remember, the data has to be triple checked for quality assurance purposes, which means every document is processed three times.)
A host of high-profile supporters
We were particularly pleased to receive support from 160 institutions and companies that involved their networks in the challenge. They included the Federal Archives, the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Felix Klein, the Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism, Reporters Without Borders Germany, the U.S. Consulate General Frankfurt, the Jewish Claims Conference, the Memorial Center Srebrenica, and Pfizer. Claudia Roth, Germany’s Minister of State for Culture and the Media, is the new patron of #everynamecounts.
#everynamecounts as a school project
Numerous schools all over Germany used the #everynamecounts challenge as a way to approach the topic of Nazi persecution. Hessischer Rundfunk, the federal state of Hesse’s public broadcasting corporation, aired a report on students at Friedrichs-Gymnasium in Kassel, for example.
»When you type it in yourself, I think you’re working on history yourself, and you can help raise awareness of this chapter of history.«
Chelsea Hahn, student at Friedrichs-Gymnasium Kassel
The challenge is over – but #everynamecounts continues
The response to the #everynamecounts challenge was overwhelming, but many millions of documents still need to be digitized in order to expand the online archive of the Arolsen Archives. For this reason, we continue asking people to take part in #everynamecounts and help us build a digital memorial to the victims and survivors of Nazism
