Wiedergutmachung

The Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF) has taken the initiative to present the history of reparations in Germany as an essential aspect of Germany's post-war and democratic history more clearly than has been the case so far. Pioneering digital offerings from Yad Vashem in Israel and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum serve as points of reference for this project.

As part of the process initiated by the Federal Ministry of Finance to provide and present sources and to research the social transformation after 1945, all available sources as well as the associated knowledge are to be recorded centrally as well as brought together and made tangible in the Archivportal-D.

The "Wiedergutmachung" project fits into this framework. On the one hand, it makes important documents that are essential for the processing of reparations accessible and, on the other hand, it makes fundamental considerations about the context of tradition and the potential for evaluation that are important for future projects. It is jointly carried out by the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg and FIZ Karlsruhe - Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure. The Landesarchiv acts as project coordinator.
The proposed project is divided into two parts. On the one hand, it is planned to index a stock of administrative documents on the reparation procedure in Baden-Württemberg, which is kept in the Department of the State Archive Ludwigsburg. On the other hand, the digitization and subsequent enrichment of the indexing data by means of machine-generated metadata is to be tested in a pilot project.

FIZ ISE will support the second part of the project. The subject of the second work package is to digitize a part of the individual case history of the Landesarchiv's restitution and then to apply automatic text and pattern recognition methods to the generated images in order to explore the potential of machine-learning methods for indexing and online placement.

• Project term: 01 May, 2020 - 31 December, 2022
• Sponsor: Bundesministerium der Finanzen
• Project partners: Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg (LABW)