The digital Book of the Dead contains the names of more than 21,000 of the approximately 30,000 prisoners who perished in the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp and its subcamps in Bavaria, Bohemia and Saxony.
Only a portion of the victims of the death marches are known by name. Even after liberation, many former prisoners continued to succumb to the effects of their incarceration. The entries in the Book of the Dead extend from the first registered deaths on May 21, 1938, to the end of the war on May 8, 1945.
The numbers indicated here are either prisoner numbers assigned by the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp or identity numbers assigned by the Wehrmacht to prisoners of war. However, many people were imprisoned or killed in the concentration camps without having been assigned a prisoner number.
The most important sources for the information contained here include:
- The eight volumes of the inmate entry registers of the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp, from the holdings of the US National Archives, Washington D.C.
- Personal effects cards for nearly all of the prisoners who had been registered with a prisoner number, located in the archive of the International Tracing Service at Bad Arolsen
- The four volumes of Flossenbürg documentation compiled by the Third US Army in September 1945, located at the US National Archives, Washington D.C.
- Transport lists, including lists from the archives of the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem, and the Center for Historical Research and Documentation on War and Contemporary Society in Brussels
- Documents from the Wehrmacht Information Office held in former Soviet military archives, mainly at the Central Archive of the Russian Ministry of Defense in Podolsk
- Death certificates issued by the SS physicians at the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp, located at the civil registry office of the municipality of Flossenbürg
- A list of graves at the cemetery of honor at the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial and additional lists of graves from other locations
- A numerous number of corresponding documents from the ITS Digital Archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.
- Databases of other institutions involved in digitizing data on victims of National Socialism
- A great deal of valuable information provided by the families of victims
The list of names is the result of extensive and ongoing archival and source-based investigation carried out since 2000, when the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial was established as a center for scholarship and research.