“Every Name Counts”
– a digital and participative project of remembrance
Christa Seidenstuecker, Arolsen Archives
The corona pandemic has made it impossible for people to come together at memorial sites to remember the many millions of victims who were imprisoned, exploited, and murdered there by the National Socialists. The Arolsen Archives offer a new form of remembrance, which is open to all: the crowdsourcing project “Every Name Counts” calls for volunteers from all over the world to enter names found on documents into the online archive to ensure that they will never be forgotten.
The background
The Arolsen Archives are an international center on Nazi persecution with the world’s most comprehensive archive on the victims and survivors of National Socialism. The collection has information on about 17.5 million people and belongs to UNESCO’s Memory of the World.
Since 2015, the Arolsen Archives have gradually been publishing more and more of their documents in an online archive. It currently contains 26 million documents, which means that almost all the historical collections held by the Arolsen Archives are now online. In May 2020, this year's European Heritage Award was awarded to the Arolsen Archives for their expanding online archive.
Names function as keys
Around 500,000 users have already searched the online archive for information. Most of them are looking for the names of individuals. Many millions of names can already be found using the simple search function. However, in some cases the digital link between the document and the names it contains is missing. This applies in particular to lists. This can result in a name search being unsuccessful - even if the name in question is contained in a document in the online archive. This is an important issue, because a person’s name can be the last clue to their fate. People all over the world are still looking for information about relatives who experienced persecution - their fates are often still unknown.
One of the users of the online archive describes this as follows: “My father never talked about the relatives he lost. So recovering even a name on a list is very important for us. These files add much more information. I am so appreciative of the efforts made in uploading this data.”
The Arolsen Archives have set themselves an ambitious goal: by 2025, it should be possible to find all the names in the millions of documents stored in the archives by means of a simple online search – so that people everywhere can easily access information on the fate of their relatives. “Every name counts” is a major milestone in achieving this goal. But it is also much more than that: “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.”