Faces of Auschwitz

Auschwitz concentration camp was established by the Germans in occupied Poland in 1940. In the next few years it became the most deadly Nazi extermination camp. It is estimated that 1.1 million people perished in Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1940-1945.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum has 38,916 registration photographs taken of Auschwitz prisoners. They are working with Brazilian photo colorization specialist Marina Amaral and a team of academics, journalists and volunteers to colorize these photographs and to research and share the stories of those photographed.

You can explore these photos and biographies on Faces of Auschwitz. The Faces of Auschwitz interactive map shows the home town locations of the photos and stories completed so far. If you click on the map markers you can view the prisoner's colorized photograph and to click through to read the individual's story.


Since 1997 German artist Gunter Demnig has been creating memorials for individual victims of the Holocaust. Demnig's stolpersteine (stumbling blocks) are small, cobblestone-sized memorials for individual victims of Nazism.

Each stolperstein is placed in the sidewalk outside the victim's home. Stolpersteine Online is a Google Map of the memorials which have been erected. The project has created about 35,000 stumbling blocks so far. This is a very small percentage of the total number of victims of the Holocaust, however if you zoom in on any German city on this map you still can't fail to be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the Nazis Holocaust.