The Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names

4.8 million victims that were murdered during the Holocaust are commemorated within the Central Database of Shoah Victim's Names hosted by the Yad Vashem Remembrance Center. Starting in 1950 as an analog archive located in Jerusalem with about 800,000 names, it was digitized in the 90s and made openly accessible to the general public via the Internet in 2004. The names were recovered from three main sources, over one-third coming from Pages of Testimony. These are one-page forms to collect names, basic biographic information, and if possible a photograph, filled out by the victim's living relatives, friends, or acquaintances. In addition, lists of names from deportations, camps, and ghetto records were gathered and processed, as well as records from many local commemoration projects around the world. In 2023 the archive encompasses over 7.5 million personal records which point to 4.8 million individual victims. It can be searched in Hebrew, Latin, or Cyrillic characters and also features a Soundex-search, where names can be searched for phonetically if the exact spelling is unknown.

The Holocaust or Shoah refers to the period between the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 until the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, when the Nazis and their collaborators killed approximately 6 million Jews in an attempt to annihilate the Jewish people in its entirety. Yad Vashem is a remembrance center for the Holocaust in Jerusalem, which conducts research, hosts several different archives and provides extensive educational material on the Shoah.

The database acts as a central place where individuals can search for their relatives and connect with their stories, often finding previously unknown kin around the world. During the mass murder of the Jewish population during WWI, the Nazis and their collaborators dehumanized their victims. This is why every name and biographical detail recorded in the archive is an act of resistance, restoring the personhood of the individuals that were killed.