Germany on Monday published a new list of names of all the known German Jews murdered in the Holocaust in the Second World War as an update to a list with only victims from former West Germany published 20 years ago.
The four-volume book, containing 150,000 names in alphabetical order along with vital data and dates of detention, now includes the names of Jews who had lived in eastern Germany and parts of modern-day Poland which were controlled by Germany before the Second World War.
According to historians, up to 600,000 Jews lived in Germany before the rise of the Nazis, the German news agency DPA reported.
The Nazis invaded much of Europe and killed an estimated six million European Jews.
The new memorial register was compiled by Germany's Federal Archives and corrects the inevitable errors in the first edition compiled in 1986.
The new list contains a complete list of the mass "deportations" from pre-war Germany, Austria and three parts of the modern Czech Republic -- the Sudetenland, Bohemia and Moravia.
Bernd Neumann, Berlin's state minister for the arts, said at a launching ceremony in Berlin's New Synagogue that it was important to complete the book because the time was approaching when there would be no living memory of the persecution.
"We have a moral duty to keep alive the memory of all the Jewish victims of the Nazi dictatorship and pass it to future generations," he said.
The updating work was done after finding new documents following the German reunification in 1990, with the help of survivors and relatives of the holocaust victims and private historians, the Federal Archives said.
Maybe this has already been discussed here as it's more than 2 years old but, I just can't make any sense of it. If 600k lived in Germany before the rise of the Nazi's, where did the other 5.4 million come from if this list includes eastern parts of Germany that is now part of modern day Poland?
It seems these numbers are more in line what the IRC published. I'd be inclined to think that even the 150k number is an exaggeration due to survivors and relatives being used as sources.