Millions of records of people persecuted during the Holocaust now available online for free

Genealogists flock to site to fill out long-standing gaps in family stories

Millions of records of people who were displaced or persecuted in the Holocaust are now available to search online for free.

The records have been digitised by Ancestry, a genealogy and DNA testing company.

Numerous genealogists have since flocked to the site to try to fill in long-standing gaps in family stories.

Rachel Silverman, a private genealogist specialising in Jewish family history, said she was enthusiastic about the development, but added that it was too early to know how useful the records would be.

“Every American Jew has people they lost,” she said. “It’s just the matter of the degree of separation.”

The release includes passenger lists of millions of displaced people, including Holocaust survivors and former concentration camp inmates, who left ports and airports in Germany and other parts of Europe from 1946 to 1971.

It also includes records of millions of people with non-German citizenship who were incarcerated in camps or otherwise living in Germany and German-occupied territories from 1939 to 1947.

The records will not tell people who they lost in the Holocaust if they do not already have an inkling.

Instead, the records could provide additional hints at why a relative took one escape route instead of another, Ms Silverman said.

“In genealogy, the almighty why is the hardest,” she said. “Why did my family end up in Atlanta when they were from the small town in Germany? When we find out how travel was arranged, that might open new doors.”

Allan Linderman, from California, had researched his 87-year-old cousin’s journey to the United States before the documents’ release. Born in Poland in 1932, the cousin, Irving Rock, and his family fled their home in the early 1930s.

They then spent more than a decade scrambling for safety, moving from one place to the next. Because he is still alive, Mr Rock offered some details from memory. But in the trauma and chaos of relocation, he could not recall when precisely he left Germany for the United States.

Searching the new collection, using the original spelling of his name — Icek Rak — Mr Linderman found his cousin. The ship departed Bremerton, Germany, for New York on 7 September 1949.

Beyond curiosity, this information is useful, Mr Linderman said. The German government and Dutch Railway offer some financial compensation to victims. But they require documentation.

“This is another step in trying to get some reparations,” he said. “These are people who cannot prove the things that the German government requires because they spent all this time hiding.”

Both collections were drawn from the Arolsen Archives, a long-standing collection maintained by the International Center on Nazi Persecution. A portion of the archives was previously digitised. Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, also maintains digital archives.

Ancestry maintains one of the largest databases of DNA profiles and family history data in the world, making more than $1 billion in revenue in 2017 alone, according to the company site.

Its financial model is built on getting millions of people to subscribe to its family history sites and pay for its DNA tests.

Ms Silverman said she had a client who wants to trace the path of his grandparents to Canada from Germany. She searched the new database and came up empty-handed.

She did find something that showed which congregation paid for the journey, but it was in the subscription database.

Successful or not, at least these searches don’t require travel or waiting for months for overstretched archivists to manually pull something up, said Marlis Humphrey, the former president of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies.

In the past, Ms Humphrey has flown to Israel from Florida to look for records.

“This is unbelievable,” she said. “We can get the records in our pyjamas, and if we didn’t search right the first time, we can search again.”

New York Times