NARA officials said the massive collection of records about looted assets, concentration camp registers and proceedings of the Nuremberg war crime trials will form part of the Web’s largest interactive collection of Holocaust records. The release of the initial 500,000 images of individual documents will make research easier and greatly increase access.
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Footnote.com plans to eventually digitize – at no cost to NARA – about one million images of Holocaust-related documents. Users will be able to access the documents for a fee through Footnote.com, but access will be free at NARA research facilities, and the documents will be available on Footnote.com for no charge during October. The company specializes in making digital records from historic documents.
People will also be able to use Footnote.com’s social-networking tool to develop Facebook-like pages to memorialize Holocaust victims. Footnote’s "I Remember" application lets people share photos, comments and stories about victims. Users can create and access the pages through Footnote.com and then share them on Facebook.
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.
Camps can be selected from a Google Map. "Each page includes a background of the camp, a map, timeline of events, and an account of some of the events."
Looted Valuables Information
+ Owner of Property
+ Photograph of items
+ Description of items
+ Item Condition
+ Location of Possessions
++ The collection is searchable.
Collections available:
+ Holocaust Era Assets: The Ardelia Hal Collection
+ German War Crime Records
+ Captured German Records
+ Dachau Concentration Camp Entry Registers
+ Flossenburg Concentration Camp Entry Registers
+ Mauthausen Death Books
+ WWII Nuremburg Interrogation Records
++ All of these records are also searchable by name, date, place, or topic
Expect more records being added to the database over time.
Fee and Free: Access to the "Stories" section of the site will always be free as will pages created using the social media tools. During the month of October, all content on the entire site is free. Then, all of the content (besides the Stories section) will be free at any computer at any NARA facility nationwide and fee-based if you do not use a NARA computer. In five years all of the content will be free on the NARA web site.
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