Memory of the victims

This archive names perpetrators in order to explain how persecution and mass murder were organised. It does not treat them as protagonists to be admired, collected or compared. The centre of the history remains the millions of people whose lives, families, homes, cultures and communities were attacked by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.

Administrative words used by the regime—resettlement, evacuation, special treatment, security operation—often concealed dispossession, forced labour, deportation and murder. Nazi Report retains such terms only when they are needed to interpret a source, and explains the violence that the euphemism was designed to hide.

No profile-level estimate can represent the experience of the victims. The same person may appear in the documentary chain of a ghetto order, a deportation schedule, a train movement, a selection and a postwar trial. For that reason, the seven circles classify power and function rather than creating a ranking based on totals.

Readers who want to continue beyond the perpetrator archive should use the linked collections of memorial museums, archives and research institutions. They preserve testimony, family records, photographs, community histories and the names of people whom the occupation system tried to erase.