The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI), a EU project which aims to combine existing Holocaust archives into a single online database, was launched in Brussels on Tuesday.
EHRI has recently been granted financial support of 7 million euros (9.5 million US dollars) from the EU's Seventh Framework Programme for Research (FP7).
It will bring together twenty research institutions, libraries, archives, museums and memorial sites from eleven EU Member States as well as Norway and Israel.
These institutions will join forces to build a database combining Holocaust archives currently dispersed around Europe, Israel and elsewhere into a cohesive corpus of research resources.
Scientists, teachers and students will have on-line access to this unique source of Holocaust material.
It will also help relations of Holocaust victims to trace information on them.
"The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure has a great responsibility to preserve the proof of the Holocaust for people in Europe and worldwide, for all of us today, and for future generations,” said European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, at the launching at the Royal Museum of Art and History in Brussels, in presence of Israel’s Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar and Belgian Holocaust survivor Nathan Ramet, chairman of the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance in Mechelen.
She stressed that 65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz "there are, unfortunately, still some people who, in the guise of promoting research and debate, question the scale, if not the very fact of the Holocaust."
"Our resolve that we must never again witness atrocities such as those of the Holocaust lies at the very heart of the foundation of the European Union," she said.
"It’s now a little more than twenty years since we witnessed the reunification of Europe, and with this, the opening up of many archives in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe."
She recalled that in 2009, forty six countries and the European Commission signed a declaration in Prague, the "Terezin Declaration on Holocaust-era assets and related issues".
The Terezin Declaration draws particular attention to the potential of Holocaust archives for advancing research and education on the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes, and encourages governments and other bodies to make archives available to the greatest extent possible to researchers and the general public.
The Commissioner stressed the importance of Holocaust education. "It is important that we remember the millions who suffered and those who perished during this dark period of European history."
"We must honour their memories and remember what happened to help ensure that such atrocities are never allowed to happen again."
Earlier this year, on the 2010 International Remembrance Day for the Victims of Holocaust, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) released the findings of the first European Union report on the Holocaust.
"This report revealed the importance attached to Holocaust education, democracy education and human rights education by governments throughout the European Union," Geoghegan-Quinn said.