In honor of International Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27th (the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp), the Arolsen Archives have launched a major participatory challenge under the hashtag #EveryNameCounts.
The goal of the challenge was to digitize the names of 30,000 former prisoners from the Stutthof concentration camp as well as information about their path of persecution within one week.
The ultimate purpose was to make the data accessible to people all over the world in their online archive and create the world’s biggest digital memorial.
Now the challenge has ended and Arolsen Archives drew a conclusion: They reached their goal and the response to the challenge was overwhelming.
Thanks to the help of over 15,000 volunteers from all over the world, they have managed to digitize the names of almost 70,000 victims of Nazi persecution recorded on documents from various concentration camps and from a search index from the early post-war period.
Assuming it takes an average of three minutes to process each document, volunteers have donated 10,500 hours of their time! (Considering the data has to be triple checked for quality assurance purposes, which means every document is processed three times.) (Source: Arolsen Archives)
#everynamecounts as school project
Numerous schools all over Germany used the #everynamecounts challenge as a way to approach the topic of Nazi persecution in class. Some of our AMeLiE partner schools took part in the challenge, too!
Even if the challenge is over, #everynamecounts continues: There are still millions of documents left that need to be digitised in order to expand the online archive. Arolsen Archives therefore continues to ask people all over the world for support in order to build a digital memorial to the victims and survivors of Nazism.
Read the whole press release of Arolsen Archives here: https://arolsen-archives.org/en/news/everynamecounts-challenge-ueber-15-000-freiwillige-waren-dabei/
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