Nazi Germany: Auschwitz Database Revealing Nazis Who Served At Concentration Camp Published Online By Poland's Institute Of National Remembrance

The Institute of National Remembrance in Poland has released the names of more than 9,000 Nazi SS personnel who served as guards and commanders at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Most of those named were Germans and evaded formal trials despite their involvement with the Holocaust and war crimes.

“Today is a historic day, but this is just the beginning. We start with Auschwitz, but we will expand the database to other concentration camps,” the Institute of National Remembrance’s Jaroslaw Szarek said Monday after the named were announced.

Aleksander Lasik initiated research for the database back in 1982. He counted more than 25,000 staff members who worked for the Nazi camps using American, German and Polish archives. Additional information about the concentration camp could be found in Russian archives, but were inaccessible.

“Work on augmenting the list will require multiple foreign queries. I hope that this database will form a foundation for all future studies of Auschwitz,” Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum director Piotr Cywinski said.

One of the main reasons why the database was created was due largely in part to thwart the misunderstanding that the concentration camps were “Polish” because of their locations, according to the BBC.

“[The database] is a tool to fight lies. We’re not expressing an opinion, we’re presenting the cold, hard facts,” Szarek said.

Around six million European Jews were killed during the Holocaust and a large portion of the mass killing occurred in the concentration camps that were created in occupied Poland. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler deemed the Jews as inferior and predicted in his memoir “Mein Kampf” that a European war would take place, causing “the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany.”

Auschwitz, which was in operation from 1940 to 1945, had the most notoriety of the concentration camps where more than 1 million people died during World War II. Located in Oswiecim, Poland, the camp was initially used as a detention center but eventually became an infamous death camp once Hitler’s “Final Solution” – the Nazi plan to exterminate Jewish people – culminated.