Wiedergutmachung records always focus on individuals: people persecuted by the National Socialist regime and their surviving relatives. Inside the millions of documents created in the course of Wiedergutmachung proceedings, descendants may find important pieces of information about their own family’s persecution fate. These records are also an important source for research on National Socialism and the early post-war period. That’s why they rank among the most frequently used records in German archives. Wiedergutmachung records are scattered across numerous archives, though. Descendants and users often don’t know which archive to approach first and struggle in the attempt to get an overview of the complete documentation on the person they are looking for.

The Online Collection “Wiedergutmachung for National Socialist Injustice” has now reached a major milestone: A demo version of the person search is now online! For the first time users can search for specific persons within a limited number of datasets. The demo version provides a first impression of the extensive research opportunities the Online Collection will offer in the future. The person search will make it much easier to find records and documents relating to a particular person: The Online Collection will link all archival records dealing with the same person(s) by means of “person pages” for all persecuted and applicant persons. The person pages will refer to all relevant individual records currently available and summarise the basic information they contain. Users will be provided a central point of access where they can start their search for persons in the context of Wiedergutmachung. 

The search form on the Online Collection’s homepage offers a low-threshold access point to search for individual persons. Users may enter search terms into only one of the search fields or combine multiple fields. Once the search has been performed, users can filter the search results by various criteria, such as places, persecution details, or damage types.

The new feature is currently a demo version that only contains datasets for 949 persons. Most of these refer to index cards of the Bundeszentralkartei. The Bundeszentralkartei is a central index pointing to the authorities, and hence to the relevant archive, where a Wiedergutmachung case file from a specific person is likely to be found. Integrating the Bundeszentralkartei into the Online Collection is of considerable value since the index gives a first indication of whether and where a file on a Wiedergutmachung case exists. Due to the limited demo sample of datasets, most search queries will currently not generate any results. For this reason, we recommend to use the feature “Search Records” in the Online Collection or the overall search in the Archivportal-D. Thanks to numerous digitisation and archival indexing projects funded by the Federal Ministry of Finance, the number of available compensation and restitution files containing personal data will significantly increase over time. 

The Online Collection Wiedergutmachung is under constant development. Our work on the person search feature is not yet complete. We therefore welcome your ideas and feedback: portal-wiedergutmachung [at] bundesarchiv.de.

In addition to an optimised viewer for digital copies, we are also looking forward to an expansion of our object pages. In the future, we will be able to present all available Information about the archival objects in the same detail as on the person pages.