The Memorial book

Commemorating Jewish victims of National Socialism has been one of the core tasks of the NS Documentation Center since its founding. In this databank you will find information about men, women, and children who were born in or lived in Cologne, and who as Jews were humiliated, deprived of their civil rights and property, driven from their homes, deported, and murdered between 1933 and 1945. In the 1925 population census, about 16,000 residents of Cologne professed the Jewish faith. At the same time, the synagogue community, which extended beyond the city’s boundaries, counted about 20,000 members. The holocaust marks a fundamental break in the history of Cologne. About half of Cologne and the region’s Jewish population was able to escape persecution by emigrating. All others, including most of those who emigrated to countries later under German occupation, were deported and murdered.

Deportation to ghettos and extermination camps began in Cologne in the fall of 1941. First, about 3,000 Jewish men, women, and children were deported to the Litzmannstadt and Riga ghettos. In late 1941 and early 1942 the majority of Cologne’s Jews were taken to a camp in Cologne-Müngersdorf. Starting in summer 1942 further deportations brought more than 3,500 people from Cologne to the Theresienstadt ghetto as well as directly to the NS extermination camps, above all to Trostenez near Minsk, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and, via Berlin, also to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Moreover, Cologne Jews were part of the mass deportation on trains that ran, for instance, from the infamous transit camps in Westerbork (occupied Netherlands), Mechelen (occupied Belgium), or Drancy (occupied France) to the extermination camps.

Finally, from fall 1944 to March 1945, those who had been spared until then as being of “mixed race” or who lived in “mixed marriages” according to the “Nuremberg Race Laws” were also interned and deported. By the end of the war there was no longer any Jewish life in the city. Only a very few had survived in hiding; even fewer returned from the camps.

Sources

Due to wartime loss and the systematic destruction of documents, the source situation is very difficult in Cologne. The questionnaires of the population census of 1939 have not survived, for example. The Gestapo records were destroyed before war’s end. The population registers up to 1945 no longer exist either.

To reconstruct the persecution and murder of Cologne’s Jewry, the NS-DOK collected the personal data of everyone who lived in Cologne from 1933 to 1945 and was persecuted because of their Jewish origins, as far as possible. For the first memorial book, which was published in 1995 in book form after seven years of work, the NS-DOK researchers had analyzed address books, various deportation lists, records of Cologne schools, the Memorial Book of the Federal Archives, contemporary and current publications, etc. In addition, there were interviews with survivors.

The databank published in the Internet in 1998 contained data on more than 7,000 men, women, and children who were deported and murdered. The records included surname, first name, birthname if applicable, date and place of birth, date and place of death, year of deportation, and deportation destination. For a large number of victims, however, no, or only fragmentary, particulars on personal data and persecution since deportation or flight from Cologne could be ascertained due to the inadequate source material. In many cases the only available reference was that relatives had had their family members declared legally dead after 1945.

Revision since 2004

In 2004 the NS Documentation Center began a fundamental revision of the memorial book. For one, the NS-DOK team thoroughly revised the databank structures. For another, it has continually catalogued and indexed and systematically evaluated new sources since then. The information that reaches the NS-DOK by way of correspondence with relatives, archives, or researchers is also taken into account.

Moreover, the criteria for including information in the memorial book has changed. The first edition of the memorial book of 1995 included only people of Jewish origin who lived in Cologne between 1933 and 1945. This group of people has now been expanded to incorporate those who were deported from Cologne even if they had not previously lived in the city. Furthermore, the databank now records those who were born in Cologne and were deported from other cities, if this information becomes known through archival research or correspondence with relatives.

This expansion is significant not only for reconstructing persecution during the Nazi era. It also became necessary because relatives generally first contact the place at which the later victims were born or from which they were deported.

The most important changes

Due to the improved accessibility of archives since the 1990s, due to digitalization and Internet, a large number of in part very comprehensive sources have become accessible. Today it is possible to describe life contexts, to follow the paths of persecution, and to shed light on individual fates in many more cases. Amongst the most important sources the NS-DOK systematically evaluates for the memorial book are the records of the Jewish self-administration of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, documents of the International Tracing Service of the Red Cross in Bad Arolsen, and the files of the former Oberfinanzdirektion Köln (Regional Finance Office Cologne).

To clearly identify the persons named in the sources and to commemorate the victims with their correct names, researchers are also investigating vital records. By evaluating birth, marriage, and death records, contradictory data about name, date of birth, and place of birth can be resolved, but more than that, family relationships can be determined and mistaken identities cleared up. In addition, birth certificates include the name, profession, confession, and place of birth of the parents; marginal notes may make reference to marriage and death of the certified person. In this manner, it is possible to largely reconstruct family links destroyed by national socialist persecution.

Last but not least, the revised memorial book draws on the information in the NSDOK´s own archives. Thanks to contacts with emigrated Cologne Jews and their descendants, the collection of photographs, personal documents, correspondence, estates, interviews, etc. continues to grow. Further information comes from the exchange with local history researchers from other communities and cities.

The memorial-book project is not closed-off; instead, it is a continuing process. The NS-DOK annual report regularly documents the key aspects in this area of work.