Thematic Portal Compensation for National Socialist Injustice

The history of reparations in Germany is an essential aspect of Germany's post-war and democratic history. The aim of the project “Thematic Portal Compensation for National Socialist Injustice“, initiated and funded by the Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF), is to highlight this connection more clearly than before. By “compensation” we mean the attempt to take responsibility for National Socialist crimes. The aim of the thematic portal is to provide evidence of all relevant sources as well as the associated knowledge in one place, bring them together and make them accessible.

These can be laws, for example, but above all individual compensation and restitution files of millions of victims. The portal thus supports the preservation and presentation of sources as well as research into the social transformation from dictatorship to democracy after 1945. It links the sources and source references with historical, legal and documentary information in order to classify and evaluate the documents and the statements they contain. The Federal Ministry of Finance has entrusted the Federal Archives, the State Archives of Baden-Württemberg and FIZ Karlsruhe with the implementation of this long-term project.

FIZ Karlsruhe has three subtasks in this project:

  • Implementing the software components necessary for the thematic portal „Wiedergutmachung“ and their maintenance,
  • Providing and  updating the infrastructure necessary for its operation, including ongoing administration
  • researching into (semi-)automatic indexing procedures and transferring them to productive operation.

To perform these tasks, our e-Research and Information Service Engineering units work closely together. 

The Information Service Engineering unit is developing innovative automatic processes to improve the transcription and extraction of information from historical documents, initially to make selected digitized document collections machine-readable in full text and to make key content available for semantic searches. In the future, the processes are to be applied to all sources, i.e. to more than 100 kilometers of files.

Before the participating archives can digitize these document holdings, they must first be indexed in depth. Many specialist archival information systems are currently unable to provide the fields required for this. The Simple Indexing and Access System (EEZU) developed by the e-Research unit in cooperation with the State Archives of Baden-Württemberg is an easy-to-use alternative that several archives have already successfully evaluated for the indexing of their restitution files.

As the technical operator and software developer of both the German Digital Library and the Archive Portal-D, the e-Research unit also ensures the connection of the subject portal to the backend of the German Digital Library, is responsible for the interaction and web design of the portal in coordination with the project partners and carries out the subsequent technical implementation.

Together with the project partners, we are continuously expanding the portal and thus providing an important resource for the research infrastructure. In doing so, we are drawing on preliminary work from the DFG project “Development of an infrastructure for the implementation of thematic access in the Archivportal-D, using topics related to the ‘Weimar Republic’ as examples”.

Publications

Project data

Portrait photo from Frank Schwichtenberg
Contact

Frank Schwichtenberg

Head e-Humanities
Phone
+49 7247 808 262
+49 7247 808 262
frank.schwichtenberg [at] fiz-karlsruhe.de