Names of 5 million of 6 million Jews killed in Holocaust now identified

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is pictured in Oswiecim, Poland, on Monday, Jan. 27, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

JERUSALEM - Five million of the more than six million Jews killed in the Holocaust have now been identified, and with the further help of artificial intelligence (AI), even more names could be recovered, Israeli researchers said on Monday.

Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, said the milestone marks seven decades of work and is at the heart of its mission to recover the identities of those murdered by the Nazis during the Second World War.

Some one million Jewish victims are still unknown “and many will likely remain so forever,” Yad Vashem said. But with tools such as AI and machine learning, it believes it could recover another 250,000 names by analyzing hundreds of millions of documents that have been too extensive to research manually.

With the number of Holocaust survivors shrinking and the world soon to be without first-hand witnesses, Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan said reaching the five million milestone was a reminder of an unfinished obligation.

“Behind each name is a life that mattered - a child who never grew up, a parent who never came home, a voice that was silenced forever,” Dayan said. “It is our moral duty to ensure that every victim is remembered so that no one will be left behind in the darkness of anonymity.”

In May 2024, Yad Vashem had said it had developed its own AI-powered software to comb through piles of records to try to identify hundreds of thousands of Jewish people killed in the Holocaust whose names are missing from official memorials.

At the time, it had tracked down information on 4.9 million individuals by reading through statements and documents, checking film footage, cemeteries and other records.

The names of Holocaust victims, as well as personal files that tell about the lives of many of them, are compiled in an online Yad Vashem database in six languages.

This database, it noted, has helped countless families reunite with lost relatives and families to commemorate loved ones, particularly as most victims were left without graves.

“The Nazis aimed not only to murder them, but to erase their existence. And by identifying five million names, we are restoring their human identities and ensuring that their memory endures,” said Alexander Avram, director of Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names, who heads the central database of victims’ names.

Reporting by Steven Scheer, editing by Peter Graff, Reuters