WARSAW, Poland (JTA) – A list of the names of Nazi SS commanders and guards who served at the Auschwitz concentration camp was published online.
The list, believed to be the most complete ever, went online Monday at the website http://en.truthaboutcamps.eu/. The list was prepared by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance in cooperation with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.
A presentation on the project was offered Monday during a conference in Krakow. Among those on hand were Jaroslaw Szarek, director of the Institute of National Remembrance, and Piotr Cywinski, director of the Auschwitz museum.
The database also provides the SS staff members’ personal data, including date and place of birth, service number, date of arrival to and departure from the camp, education and citizenship. Photographs of some of the SS officers are shown and, in the case of those who were tried in courts after the war, their court records.
Cywinski said the database “is the result of a several-generations-long investigation started immediately after the war by the commissions prosecuting criminals, and then continued in the Auschwitz Museum. The Germans before escaping the camp exported and burned the camp administration records. They destroyed most of the documents.”
Szarek called the posting of the list a historic day.
“This base is the beginning of a large project,” he said at the conference. “We start with Auschwitz, but we are planning to expand this list also to other German Nazi concentration camps.”
In 1941, the SS garrison in Auschwitz had about 700 members, in June 1942 about 2,000, in April 1944 about 3,000, and in August 1944 about 3,300. In mid-January 1945, in connection with the final evacuation of Auschwitz, there were 4,480 SS members and 71 SS female overseers.
The database does not include personal data of Wehrmacht staff used in some subcamps and external commandos as support staff and sentries of the Ukrainian military company. There also is no data of nurses of the German Red Cross who were not SS members.
This month, the Auschwitz museum appealed to Germans and Austrians for personal SS documents, photographs, personal letters or any other materials relating to the staff of the camp.
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