For the first time, millions of Holocaust records have been made available online by Ancestry.com.

The online genealogy company digitised the documents with the help of the Arolsen Archives International Centre on Nazi Persecution, and can be accessed for free on its site.

Howard Hochhauser, the chief financial officer of Ancestry.com, said: "This collection will help people learn more about the magnitude of the Holocaust, those who lived through it and those who perished as a result of it."

The first part of the records - Africa, Asia and Europe Passenger Lists of Displaced Persons - tracks displaced people who left Germany and other European countries from 1946 to 1971.

The 1.7 million records in the collection mostly document the journeys of Holocaust survivors, former concentration camp inmates and laborers, and refugees from Central and Eastern European countries as they traveled to different countries, especially America, after the Second World War.

The second collection, Registration of Foreigners and German Individuals Persecuted, includes 9.97 million records from 1939 to 1947, documenting persecution faced by German Jews, people with non-German citizenship, and stateless people living in Germany and areas of German occupation.

The records are not restricted to those who were imprisoned in camps and include information on the deceased, such as burial records.

All together, the project contains approximately 1.2 million digitized images, which are searchable by entering a person's basic demographic information.

Previously, accessing these records required submitting manual requests for copies of the documents.

With a free Ancestry.com account, users can search documents by name, place and date of birth, departure and destination.

Records available online include those from the American zone of post-war occupied Germany.

In early 2020, Ancestry plans to continue digitizing documents from the British, French and Soviet zones.