National Archives and Footnote.com Announce New Digital Holocaust Collection

A press notice about this amazing new collection online came to my email box this morning. I've pulled the highlights to share with readers:

Collection includes Holocaust-related photos and records available online for first time

Washington DC and Lindon, UT -September 29, 2009 - The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and Footnote,com today announced the release of the internet's largest Interactive Holocaust Collection. For the first time ever, over one million Holocaust-related records - including millions of names and 26,000 photos from the National Archives- will be available online.

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.

*** Access to the collection will be available for free on Footnote,com through the month of October ***

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.

So that visitors may more easily access and engage the content, Footnote,com has created a special Holocaust site featuring:

Stories of Holocaust victims and survivors.

Place where visitors can create their own pages to memorialize their Holocaust ancestors.

Pages on the concentration camps - includes descriptions, photos,maps, timelines and accounts from those who survived the camps.

Descriptions and samples of the original records from the National Archives.

The Holocaust collection is the latest in a continuing partnership between Footnote,com and the National Archives to scan, digitize, and make historical records available online. The goal is to give more people access to these and other historical records that have previously only been available through the research room of the National Archives. This partnership brings these priceless resources to an even greater number of people and enables the National Archives
to provide ever-greater access to these critical holdings.