A common multilingual web portal is being developed by VGKN and CERD – you are just reading it. It is intended to make the “Network Natzweiler” visible for all users – on the level of the former camps and on the level of the present-day memorial sites. It is not a substitute for the individual websites of the memorial sites.
The work on the web portal started in 2018. Its basic outline should be completed by the end of 2019/early 2020.
This web portal will contain information about the history of the KZ Natzweiler and its satellite camps as well as about the memorial sites on both sides of the river Rhine. In the long run, the media centre aspires completeness about the Natzweiler camp complex – it will continue to grow. Users can find a prisoner list and can obtain information on how to use the pertinent database. The portal is trilingual (German, French, English) and it will be linked to common social media platforms.
The portal targets Europeans of all ages. At the same time, it constitutes a central platform for the introduction of border-transcending cooperation projects (art projects, student projects, youth projects), to market them and present their results.Based on the work of Dr. Robert Steegmann, the Natzweiler memorial sites have performed research into the names and biographies of former prisoners – and continue to do so. The information should be integrated into a database.
They are at the disposal of the families of the former victims and of researchers and shall be made available online.
In order to create this database with approximately 52.000 data sets, so far, two work contracts have been awarded, financed by the German Federal Government, the Land of Baden-Württemberg and the Office National des Anciens Combattants et Victimes de Guerre (ONACVG).
This requires solving numerous problems rooted in orthographic variation and difficult data protection issues. For a scientific exchange about these issues, the contractor was sent to Israel with financing from the VGKN to participate in an international database colloquium of the Yad Vashem memorial site in Israel.
A control group consisting of historians from Germany and France and one informatics scientist accompanies the work on the database.
It is scheduled to be completed by 2020.