Central Name Index

The Central Name Index contains about 50 million references to the fate of 17.5 million people. The Index is the key to the ITS collection and is arranged by last name, first name and date of birth.

Right from the beginning every piece of information that found its way to the Tracing Service was documented. Information referring to documents was recorded on index cards while inquiries were recorded on inquiry cards. Nowadays, the information is stored digitally, with separate data sets for index cards and inquiries.

As a result of the range of nationalities and languages involved, an alphabetic-phonetic filing system was developed for the Tracing Service. The index was digitalised in 1998 – 1999. Since 2000, all inquiries are processed by computer.

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