School students take the lead
A pilot project for “Every Name counts” involving around 1000 school students from Germany was launched on 27 January 2020 - 75 years after the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp. The students spent the day transcribing names and dates of birth from deportation lists, reconstructing biographies, and reflecting on the fate of the deportees. The Arolsen Archives had provided the schools that took part with a comprehensive kit of materials in advance for use during the preparation and follow up phases of the project.
The students worked on deportation lists from the German towns of Kassel, Frankfurt am Main, Darmstadt, and Wiesbaden. The regional focus made the young people think: often the deportees' last address was in a street that they knew or in the town that they came from themselves. For the students who took part, working with original documents containing the names and ages of the victims, as well as information about where they lived, was an unusually direct approach to learning about the crimes committed by the Nazi regime.
The project goes international
The project was expanded to international level at the end of April. Anyone who has a PC and a reliable internet connection can now take part in “Every Name Counts.” It uses an internet platform that makes it easy for anyone to help transcribe information like names, dates of birth, and sometimes also the deportees’ occupation or last address from the historical documents and enter them into a database.
In order to prevent mistakes or improper use, every document has to be processed three times by three different people. The data are compared, corrected, and completed by staff of the Arolsen Archives before being transferred to the database that lies at the heart of the online archive. This process takes a few weeks, and once it has been completed, the chances of obtaining positive search results are greatly increased.