Research on Victims of Nazi Persecution Reached New High in 2025

More people than ever before have conducted research at the Arolsen Archives on the victims of Nazi persecution

• 830,000 users visited the online archive – nearly 20% more than in 2024
• Individual inquiries rose by around 20% to 25,500
• 216,000 new volunteers participated in #everynamecounts – a 70% increase

Most inquiries still come from the relatives of victims of Nazi persecution. “Each year,
more families are seeking information about what happened to their relatives,” explains
Director Moritz Wein, who took over the leadership of the Arolsen Archives in April 2026.
“Our humanitarian mission is not a thing of the past – it remains very much alive today.”
Interest from the general public is also on the rise. In 2025, inquiries from private individuals
with no direct family connection to the victims passed the 10% mark for the first
time. This reflects a broader trend in the culture of remembrance, with local remembrance
initiatives springing up across Europe in ever greater numbers in recent years.
“The archival holdings and the educational programs of the Arolsen Archives can make a
targeted contribution to remembrance at the regional and local level. The Arolsen Archives
are committed to actively supporting these developments,” Wein adds.

Virtual research and remembrance

The online archive, the central digital portal to the historical documents, attracted
830,000 users last year, an increase of 20% compared to the figures for 2024. The
crowdsourcing initiative #everynamecounts also set a new record: 216,000 volunteers
got actively involved in digitizing historical documents, a 70% increase. Together, they
processed 1.15 million documents, 45% more than the previous year. At the same time,
the number of users accessing the Arolsen Archives website, which was redesigned in
2025, rose by 44% to more than 830,000.

Families are still searching for relatives

In 2025, the Arolsen Archives also managed to bring together descendants of victims of
Nazi persecution who had not known each other before. One particularly notable case
involved two siblings who only found out about their half-sister late in their lives – and
only by chance – long after the death of their Jewish parents, who survived the Holocaust,
but then emigrated to different countries. Today, the three siblings live in France, the USA, and Israel and are overjoyed that the three branches of the family have finally
been reunited. In 2025, 80 years after the end of World War II, the Arolsen Archives
managed to reunite the families of victims of Nazi persecution in four separate cases.