Examples of successful cooperations

The Arolsen Archives not only publish their own historical collection, but also cooperate with international partner institutions in order to offer an ever more comprehensive online collection of documents on victims of Nazi persecution. This benefits all sides: The partners receive metadata for their own use and interested parties can find more and more information in one central location – our online archive. A few examples.

Cooperation with Stutthof

Through cooperation with the Stutthof Memorial, it has been possible to replace poor copies of imprisonment documents from the 1970s with good, up-to-date scans. “We have now integrated the entire collection into our holdings, with the originals remaining in Poland. That’s exactly 48,657 files,” explains Giora Zwilling, Head of the Digital Transformation & Archives . They are now “deeply indexed” using the latest technology, meaning they can be searched by name, profession, date of birth, maiden name and even original address with street and house number.

Comparison before and after

Thanks to a cooperation with the Stutthof Museum and Memorial, poor-quality copies from the 1970s have been replaced by high-quality scans.

New documents on Auschwitz

In the past the Arolsen Archives have been working with the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum to provide access to more information on the names and fates of the people who were imprisoned there. As a result of this partnership, the well-known Photos of male prisoners taken in Auschwitz can now be accessed in the online archive. In addition, students taking part in our #everynamecounts project have been working on Transport lists (to and from Auschwitz and other camps), which can now be searched for individual names. Most recently, volunteers helped to record prisoner identity cards from Auschwitz, which are now kept in archives in Prague and Moscow, as digital copies for the online archive.

Photos and lists

Our collection now contains copies of photographs of prisoners of KL Auschwitz, taken by prisoners who were employed in the prisoner registration department of the Political Department (Department II) in the years 1941-1945, as well as transport lists, for example on the arrival or departure of prisoners, which provide information on the fate of several people.

Deportation lists from Vienna

By entering into a cooperation with the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance in Vienna, we have been able to add deportation lists of Jews from Austria to the online archive. These documents were already available beforehand, but only as old copies that were barely legible and hardly searchable. “Vienna was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the former German Reich,” explains the Zwilling. “Thanks to our cooperation with the Documentation Archive, we received photos and metadata for the deportation lists in October and integrated them into our online archive.”