Five million Holocaust victims identified through decades of research and AI

Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi regime murdered an estimated six million Jews across Europe. Most were never issued death certificates. For seven decades, researchers at Yad Vashem in Israel have worked to recover what the Nazis tried to erase: the names of the dead.

Last year, they hit a milestone. Five million victims have now been identified and recorded in the Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names—a searchable online archive in six languages.

How names are being recovered

The work began in the 1950s, driven by survivors, descendants, and historians who combed through fragmentary records: transport lists, ghetto documents, witness testimonies, immigration papers. Each name recovered meant someone was no longer lost to anonymity. But the pace was slow, constrained by the sheer volume of documents and the detective work required to piece together a single life from scattered sources.

Then, in the past year, Yad Vashem deployed artificial intelligence to accelerate the search. The technology works by cross-referencing names across different historical records—checking survivor testimonies against transport lists, matching individuals mentioned in multiple documents to avoid duplicates, and tracing family connections that human researchers might miss. Daniel Shalom, head of technology at Yad Vashem, describes the tool as still untapped: "We haven't exhausted its potential yet."

Already, AI has helped compile what Yad Vashem calls "a significant amount" of previously unknown names. The organization estimates another 250,000 names could be recovered in the near future.

The human element remains essential

But the technology has a hard limit. It can only find names that already exist somewhere in the historical record—a document, a testimony, a registration. An estimated one million victims left no paper trail at all. This is why Yad Vashem continues to appeal to survivors and their families to submit "Pages of Testimony," personal accounts that preserve not just a name but a life: a child's laugh, a parent's profession, a voice that would otherwise vanish.

Alexander Avram, director of the Hall of Names, tells researchers that these pages function as "tombstones for the Jews who were assassinated during the Holocaust." Since the 1950s, about 2.8 million of these testimonies have been collected and added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.

Time is narrowing. Most surviving Holocaust witnesses are now in their 80s and 90s. "This is the last hour," Avram says. What they remember, what they can still tell us, may be irreplaceable.

Yad Vashem's leaders acknowledge they will likely never identify every victim. But they will keep searching—expanding the AI's reach into international databases, training it further, and listening for the stories still waiting to be told. Each name recovered is an act of restoration: a person returned from the darkness of erasure to the permanence of remembrance.