Hardly any of the information in the documents was filled out by the people concerned. Almost all the papers from concentration camps, public authorities or occupation administrations are based on information given orally or copied from other documents. Different spellings resulted from the varying writing and language skills of the clerks who filled out the forms. Even after the war, clerks wrote data down after hearing it spoken only or they transcribed or copied data from handwritten documents or other sources which were hard to read. This is why the Central Name Index of the Arolsen Archives is based on an alphabetic-phonetic system which also takes the pronunciation of the names into account.
Sometimes the victims of Nazi persecution themselves gave different versions of their names or dates of birth. An assumed identity or the date of birth could be the key to survival. Often, people continued to use these names and dates after the war or they changed them to suit their new goals.
It is impossible today to reconstruct the different reasons and backgrounds for such variations, so we transfer the spellings used in the original documents to our archive database without making any changes because the spellings themselves are of historical value.