[AP] Aron Heller - The German government on Thursday handed Israel's national Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, the personal details of 600,000 Jewish residents of Nazi Germany. The new directory includes the names and addresses of the Jewish residents and classifies them into those who survived, those who perished and those whose fate remains unknown. The list includes details on emigration, detention and deportation, as well as where and when people died. With this latest list, Yad Vashem has essentially completed its database on German Jewry during the Nazi era, said Yad Vashem director Avner Shalev. Its focus will now turn to compiling a similar database on the Jews who lived in Poland and eastern Europe, an extremely difficult task because of poor record-keeping, large-scale executions and mass destruction of villages. It took 20 German scientists four years to compile the directory and cost $2.24 million. "It is a memorial to those murdered and those forced into exile. The shame for the crimes committed by the Germans is mixed with grief for the loss that Germany inflicted upon itself," said Martin Salm, the chairman of "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future," the German foundation that produced the directory together with the German federal archives.
2008-10-24 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive