Ancestry.com quietly adds incredible WWII database

On By Vera MillerIn Discovering Documents

The summer can be a quiet time for genealogy research until a new database appears online.

Out of curiosity to see if any new documents have appeared on Ancestry.com for my immigrant relatives, I discovered “Europe, Registration of Foreigners and German Persecutees, 1939-1947”.

The incredible database of 10.1 million documents, obtained from Arolsen Archives- International Center on Nazi Persecution in Germany, provides names, birthdates, birthplaces, nationalities and addresses of foreigners present in Germany from 1939-1947 and Nazi persecution victims.

Here is a sample document from the database:

I highly recommend searching for any relatives or ancestors who could have been in Germany during 1939-1947. I was surprised the seven documents I found on my mother’s family were new online.

Arolsen Archives- International Center on Nazi Persecution has 13 million documents on Nazi persecution victims and war refugees in its database. The documents on my relatives posted to Ancestry aren’t available on that database.

To begin the search on this database, start here. The results can be narrowed down by first and last names, birthdates, birthplaces and relatives’ names.

Here is the database narrowed down by ethnic groups: Jewish, Polish, Soviet citizens (people from the USSR were lumped together), Czechoslovakian, Romanian, Hungarian, French, Bulgarian, Greek, Yugoslavian and Italian.

Since the database comes from Germany, y’s will be turned into j’s and v’s into w’s. I’ve also seen g’s turned into z’s and incorrect vowels within names.

This database could piece together family stories from WWII. With the 75th anniversary of WWII’s finale coming, many more records are likely coming online from Arolsen Archives. This blog will post when more records become available online.

Related posts:
10 million records added to WWII victims database
Database of political terror victims in the USSR explodes past 3 million
Newest Ancestry.com database will turn brickwalls into dust

17 thoughts on “Ancestry.com quietly adds incredible WWII database”

      1. Peter Henderson

        Link worked yesterday but not today. I get an error saying “year start date must be before year end date”.

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    1. No. This database on Ancestry has nothing on my father’s family and more records on my mother’s family. There are millions and millions of records this agency has to still digitize.

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  5. Alas, my great-uncle isn’t there either, nor in the other database, yet I know he was in Oflag IVB because I have a Red Cross postcard he sent to my babcia in 1943..Oh well, maybe I’ll find more evidence elsewhere at some point…Thanks for the great heads up – I help people find their ancestors here at the library where I work and it’s good to know this is now available on Ancestry. Wonder if it’s also in the Library Edition…

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  6. Jean Humeniuk

    Thank you for this post. I finally found additional info on a family member, Marthe Barthelemy, b. 1844 in Belgium. I had been told she settled in Frankfurt Germany…but it was actually Frankenberg. Hoping now to find death date and burial.

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