Holocaust archive digitizes thousands of documents of Nazi horrors
Wiener Library's online portal provides free access to crucial documents, photos, transcripts, and testimonies including Nuremberg War Crimes Trials and the Battle of Cable Street
The Wiener Holocaust Library, one of the largest Nazi-era archives in the world, has launched a new online portal putting over a quarter of a million pages of evidence of the Holocaust and those who resisted it at the hands of researchers worldwide.
This project, announced to mark International Holocaust Memorial Day, is the largest and most ambitious of its kind anywhere in the UK.
This new online portal provides free access to crucial documents, photos, transcripts, and testimonies that have been digitised over the past three years. It launches with more than 150,000 digitised pages relating to 10,000 records evidencing the genocide of Europe’s Jews and the stories of the individuals and groups who tried to warn Europe of what was to follow in the face of antisemitic persecution.
Some of the collections now accessible online for the first time include:
· Tarnschriften (or ‘hidden writings’) were everyday pamphlets and books cleverly concealing anti-Fascist propaganda, so it could be distributed and shared among a population kept in the dark by a totalitarian regime and an unfree press.
These camouflaged pamphlets, disguised as advertisments for cosmetics or shampoo, recipe books and even instruction manuals for housewives, offer a unique insight into the scale of anti-Nazi resistance in the Third Reich. The Library’s, now fully digitised, collection of almost 500 of these pamphlets is the largest outside of Germany.
· Valuable materials about fascist and anti-fascist movements in the UK including documents relating to the Battle of Cable Street, the rise of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, and Jewish anti-fascist groups which organised against the far right in Britain both before and after the Second World War.
· Nuremberg War Crimes Trials documents – This collection, donated to the library by the Nuremberg War Crimes trial authorities, comprises authenticated copies and translations into English of Nuremberg War Crimes trial documents which specifically relate to the fate of Europe’s Jews. It was donated to the Library as a quid pro quo for assistance provided to the prosecutors at the trials, and remains one of the institution’s most well used collections.
· Photographs of Auschwitz-Birkenau – Holocaust Memorial Day this year marks 80 years since the Liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army. This month visitors to the site can access photographs of the liberation.
Dr Toby Simpson, director of the Wiener Library said: “The Wiener Holocaust Library’s collections were gathered with an unparalleled urgency. For the Jewish refugees who built our archives, documentation was often a matter of life and death. The importance of our mission, to serve as a Library of record of the Holocaust, has hardly receded since then. The need to defend the truth has been given new urgency by the resurgence of antisemitism and other forms of misinformation and hatred.
“Wiener Digital Collections provides a keystone resource for Holocaust research and education. By placing a wealth of evidence freely available online we are ensuring that the historical record is available for all regardless of their location, prior knowledge or means.”
Dan Stone, professor of modern history at Royal Holloway, University of London, and director of its Holocaust Research Institute, said: “By making accessible many of the Library’s institutional files, including correspondence and internal documents, the Wiener Holocaust Library has placed at researchers’ fingertips a vast and fascinating resource. Whether researching the history of archives, postwar trials, restitution, or the history of the Holocaust itself, the online availability of these documents on a user-friendly website is a boon to scholarship.”
The Wiener Holocaust Library is the world’s oldest continuously functioning archive and library documenting Nazi crimes, and the largest collection of Holocaust-related material in the UK, including thousands of documents donated by Holocaust survivors and their families.
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