In the year the world commemorates the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) project sets out to support research into the Holocaust. EHRI’s main objective is to support the European Holocaust research community and help initiate new levels of collaborative research through the development of innovative methodologies, research guides and user-driven transnational access to research infrastructures and services. To this end, EHRI proposes to design and implement a Virtual Research Environment offering online access to a wide variety of disparate and dispersed key Holocaust archival materials and to a number of online tools to work with them. Building on integrating activities undertaken over the past decades by the 19 partners in the consortium and a large network of associate partners, EHRI sets out to transform the data available for Holocaust research around Europe and elsewhere into a cohesive corpus of resources.EHRI will first and foremost strengthen the existing clusters of excellence in Holocaust research, but also serve as a 'best practice' model for other archival or humanities projects as well as for more encompassing follow-up projects in contemporary history. Although EHRI is primarily geared towards the needs of scholarly communities, the online availability and open access to reliable and properly contextualized Holocaust material is relevant and important for the larger public well beyond scholarly communities, as its research topic is deeply rooted in the development of European societies. European support and a European approach are essential to achieve an integral and comprehensive approach to the history of the Holocaust as a European phenomenon.