The Kaufering Concentration Camps Interviews in the Visual History Archive of the USC Shoa Foundation

Starting in June 1944, 11 concentration camps were erected in the Landsberg/Kaufering region (about 60 kilometers west of Munich). The camps all were named Kaufering with a number and were satellite camps of Dachau. Until the end of the war 23,500 almost exclusively Jewish prisoners were forced to work on three huge construction sites for aircraft production facilities (project “Ringeltaube”). More than 6,500 people died in these camps; 3,500 people which were unable to work anymore were transported to Auschwitz and other camps and were mostly murdered immediately. The Kaufering concentration camps were freed on April 27, 1945. The Visual History Archive of the USC Shoa Foundation has 591 Interviews of Holocaust survivors who mention Kaufering in their interviews. As part of the seminar “Computational Social Science” at the Bavarian School of Public Policy at the Technical University of Munich (Winter Semester 2019/20) 25 students transcribed parts of a total of 234 of these interviews. The students were asked to transcribe the interview parts that include accounts about the concentration camps in Kaufering. Interviews were transcribed in seven languages (88% English). Overall 276,126 words have been transcribed. During class, the transcribed interviews were used for text analytical studies.