Collection of photographs from the Kazerne Dossin Archives

The Kazerne Dossin project “Give them a Face” established a goal to collect as many photos of the 25,834 Mechelen deportees and the 5,858 Belgian-French deportees as possible, in order to give these Holocaust victims back their face and therefore their identity. To achieve this goal, Kazerne Dossin reached three major sources: 1. The pictures that were donated to the museum by survivors or relatives of deportees, or which remain part of private collections (the Kazerne Dossin, Mechelen (name of file)); 2. The relics: Documents of deportees that were guarded by the Dossin camp administration from transport XX onwards instead of destroying them as happened with the documents of the deportees from transports I to XIX. Kazerne Dossin, Mechelen 3. The immigration files kept by the Immigration Police: This type of file was opened for each immigrant older than 15 who arrived in Belgium (State Archives in Belgium, Brussels). In 2004 the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance (JMDR, currently Kazerne Dossin) obtained authority from the Home Office to digitize the photos in the immigration files of deported Jews and Romanies. These files were at the time guarded by the Office of Immigration. In 2005 the JMDR started to scan only the photos. In 2008 the Office of Immigration transferred all the immigration files drafted before 1947 to the Belgian State Archives. The JMDR had already come to an agreement with the State Archives in 2007 concerning the digitization of the complete files of the Jews and Romanies deported from Dossin and France to Auschwitz-Birkenau and the other concentration and extermination camps mentioned above. In 2008 the JMDR started this digitization project which was finished in December 2013.