Germany Updates Official List of Jews Murdered by Nazis in WWII

BERLIN - Germany yesterday published a new register of names of all known German Jews killed in the Holocaust, issuing a second edition of a register that was first published 20 years ago and listed only victims from former West Germany.

The four-volume book, containing 150,000 names in alphabetical order, along with vital data and dates of detention, now includes Jews who had lived in eastern Germany and parts of modern-day Poland that were in German hands before World War II.

Historians say up to 600,000 Jews lived in Germany before the rise of the Nazis. The greater part managed to flee.

The new memorial register was compiled by Germany's Federal Archives and corrects the inevitable errors in the first, 1986 edition that was deposited in the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

Alongside the alphabetical list for Germany, the register 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, 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 on to future generations," he said.