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The Remembrance of Auschwitz Supplemented
Additional Victims of the Nazis Identified. Staffers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Archives have finished converting 47 thousand documents from Buchenwald Concentration Camp into digital form. The Polish Red Cross holds the original documents. The Red Cross asked the Archives to carry out the work, and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage extended financial support.
Preliminary analysis indicates that almost 30% of the documents have to do with Auschwitz prisoners. Thanks to the work of the archivists, the data base will grow to include an as yet unknown number of new names of victims of Auschwitz, the largest Nazi German concentration camp.
The new information will fill gaps in the series of Memorial Books, containing the names of prisoners, that the Museum has been publishing in recent years. Archives director Wojciech Płosa says that some of the extant Auschwitz documentation refers to prisoners only by their camp numbers. “This new information will enable us to establish or confirm the fate of many prisoners,” said Płosa. “It is a valuable addition to our knowledge about Auschwitz.”
The new information will appear in the Museum’s online data base (www.auschwitz.org), which currently contains the names of almost 150,000 prisoners, as established so far by historians. It will also be turned over to the Karta Center, which is working on a project titled Individual Losses and Victims of Repression under German Occupation, which aims at compiling a list of the names of Polish citizens who suffered under the German occupation from 1939-1945.
More on the documents
The collection of documents from Buchenwald Concentration Camp (47,197 two-page digital scans) consists of four kinds of documents containing information on male and female Polish prisoners of concentration camps including Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and Gross-Rosen.
There are documents of different types involved. The great majority, about 34 thousand, make up the so-called Häftlings-Personal-Kartei (prisoner personal card file), compiled by the labor departments of the Auschwitz and Buchenwald camps from 1940 to 1945. They include identifying information, the prisoners’ physical characteristics, notes on transfers between camps, and records of assignments to labor details. In some cases, a photograph is attached. These documents use special purpose-made forms, as well as cards used to collect data in the Hollerith system for the WVHA.
Another group of documents comprises the card file of the Buchenwald concentration camp, probably drawn up in the camp administration’s scribe chamber (secretarial office: Lagerschreibstube, Abteilung III-Schutzhäftlagerführung). This file mainly covers prisoners sent directly to Buchenwald for incarceration or transferred from Dachau between 1938 and 1942. Aside from personal information and the reasons for imprisonment, these cards also include notations on transfers and the death of prisoners.
The document collection also contains a card file of items deposited by prisoners in the Effektenkammer, Abteilung IV, at Birkenau, and a card file of money deposited by prisoners (with the exception of money transferred along with prisoners to other camps). The first of these files uses forms with spaces to list the items of clothing deposited, identifying data, the address of the prisoner’s next of kin, and the date of the prisoner’s death. The form used for the monetary deposits has spaces for identifying data on the prisoner, the prisoner’s Buchenwald camp number, the amount of money transferred to or paid out to the prisoner, and the prisoner’s signature. Both types of documents were used from 1939 to 1945.
[Ewa Bazan]
