NARA and Footnote.com Announce New Digital Holocaust Collection

This week, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and Footnote.com announced the release of a new Interactive Holocaust Collection. Over one million Holocaust-related records – including millions of names and 26,000 photos from the National Archives- will be available online. The collection can be viewed at: https://www.footnote.com/holocaust.

Access to the collection will be available for free on Footnote.com through the month of October. Footnote.com is a subscription website that features searchable original documents.

Included among the National Archives records available online at Footnote.com are:

  • Concentration camp registers and documents from Dachau, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, and Flossenburg
  • The “Ardelia Hall Collection” of records relating to the Nazi looting of Jewish possessions, including looted art
  • Captured German records including deportation and death lists from concentration camps
  • Nuremberg War Crimes Trial proceedings

The collection also includes nearly 600 interactive personal accounts of those who survived or perished in the Holocaust provided by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The project incorporates social networking tools that enable visitors to search for names and add photos, comments and stories, share their insights, and create pages to highlight their discoveries. There will be no charge to access and contribute to these personal pages.

This is the latest in series of partnerships NARA has formed with organizations from a variety of sectors (private, public, non-profit, educational, Government) to scan, digitize, and make historical records available online. Under the agreements, partners may charge the public for access to their online services, but online access to the products of the partnerships are free in NARA research rooms.