About the Database

The Shoah Related Lists Database is a small section of the Yad Vashem archives, selected for containing concentrated information on individuals in list form. The database of the lists can be searched by various parameters, such as geography, chronology, identity of the listed individuals, provenance of the documents, and so on. The lists themselves have been scanned and can be viewed online - or, if they are not yet accessible, they soon will be. In most cases, the names of the individuals on the lists have not yet been entered into the Central Database of Shoah Victims Names, and thus are not yet searchable by name.

In addition to documentation from the Yad Vashem archives, about 10% of the lists in the Lists Database are from the collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. The database is hosted simultaneously on the websites of both institutions. The USHMM version, called "Holocaust Name List Catalogue",  is accessible here. Additional institutions may soon join us in posting information about the lists in their possession.

What are lists? Any historical document that contains concentrated enumerations of vital data of individuals from the Nazi era.

Who compiled the lists? All sorts of people and organizations. The common denominator of the lists is their form, nothing else. Some were meticulously prepared by the Nazis, or by Jews for the Nazis; others were prepared by local agencies before the Nazis appeared, others were compiled after the Nazi defeat, and summarize what happened under them. Contrary to the commonly accepted myth, the Nazis never kept centralized lists of everything they were doing, nor did anyone else afterwards. Instead, what exist are many thousands of fragments. The Shoah Related Lists Database is an attempt to collect the fragments and fit them together, thereby creating the semblance of a centralized list.

How many names are on each list? Some are very long, and contain thousands or even tens of thousands of names; others contain five, or ten, or a few dozens of names. Since they were created for many reasons, by many different agencies, there is no uniform format of the lists.

What languages are the lists in? Any and all European languages. Romanian authorities wrote in Romanian, Soviet authorities wrote in Russian, Jews sometime wrote in Yiddish, and the Germans wrote in German. Some lists were typed in bureaucratic forms, other were handwritten on slips of paper. And so on.

How many lists are there? The Lists Database currently contains some 11,000 lists. 1,041 are from the collections of the USHMM. About two thirds of the lists appear both as descriptive records and scanned images; the rest appear only as descriptive records. All of these numbers can be expected to grow, as the List Database is periodically updated.

How many names appear on the lists? The version of the Lists Database that went online on July 31^st 2006 contained lists with 5,000,000 names on them. Since some individuals appear on more than one list, it is not possible to say how many individual people are mentioned. Yet the overlap would not seem to be particularly pervasive.

Are there additional lists from the same period, which are not in the Lists Database? Yes. Thousands of them. There are an unknown number of lists that have yet to reach the archives of Yad Vashem or the USHMM. From those that have, not all have been entered into the Lists Database. As work at both institutions continues, it is recommended that researchers periodically recheck the database to see if what they seek might have been added.

Did all the people on the lists perish in the Holocaust? No. Some of the lists are explicitly of survivors. Many tell of victims of the Nazis at some point of their persecution – in a ghetto, a camp, on a deportation train – and do not tell what happened to them after the list was created. Nor should one infer from the fact that a list is at Yad Vashem that the people on it necessarily perished. A list, like any historical document, cannot tell more than what is on it.

Are they all Jews? No. People wrote lists for all sorts of reasons, so there are all sorts of people on them. While both Yad Vashem and the USHMM collect documentation about the Holocaust, there is no way – nor no wish – to collect documentation solely about Jews. The attempt is to collect all the documentation about the event.

The program of identifying, cataloguing, and uploading information about Holocaust-related lists is supported by the Victims List Project. Collecting and scanning the lists has been made possible through the support of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference).