Photographs of up to 2,000 Holocaust survivors from Dachau will be made available this spring in a searchable online archive.

The International Tracing Service (ITS), which researches and documents Nazi persecution during the Holocaust, said the people in the images were identified because of a recently-discovered card index file.

The photographs were used by survivors after the Second World War to prove they had been in the Dachau concentration camp and were entitled to support from relief organisations.

“Photos are especially valuable because we have only very few of them, and even fewer in the original,” said Franziska Schubert, who works at the ITS.

“What we have here, for the most part, are not documents made by the perpetrators, but photos the survivors submitted themselves.”

Many of those pictured are wearing in casual clothing or uniform, but some are dressed in inmates’ suits — presumably because shortly after their liberation they had nothing else to wear, the ITS said.

Among those identified is Stanislaw Galka, a Polish farmworker forced by the Nazis to work in an enginge factory.

He was deported aged 16 to Dachau in 1945, where he survived and — it is presumed — met his future wife Stefania. The couple emigrated to the United States in 1951.

All the photographs and documents have been digitised and will be searchable by name or birthdate in the spring of 2019.