One of the world’s largest Holocaust archives was published online for the first time Monday, coinciding with Holocaust Memorial Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
The Wiener Holocaust Library’s new online portal includes more than 150,000 documents — such as photos, transcripts and testimonies — detailing Nazi Germany’s genocide of six million European Jews.
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The items include photographs of Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi death camp in Poland where more than one million Jews died between 1940 and its liberation on January 27, 1945.
This website allows readers around the world to access digital copies of many of the Library’s most important collections. These include the Jewish Central Information Office’s reports on the growth of antisemitism in Europe in the 1930s, as well as documents donated to the library by the Nuremberg war crimes trial authorities in return for the support the Library gave to prosecutors. Numerous photographic collections, for example photographs of Łódź ghetto, sit alongside published materials, for instance a selection of anti-Nazi writings with innocuous covers to escape censorship.
Composite image featuring items from our unique collection, now available online for the first time. Source: Wiener Holocaust Library
Wiener Digital Collections’ state-of-the-art viewer allows users to find the materials they want easily. It is an important tool for promoting Holocaust research and education, and for combatting the rising tide of antisemitism
Dr Toby Simpson, Director of the Library: “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.
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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 skilfully 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. As extremist far-right figures threaten Europe and elsewhere, these collections reveal not only the origins of these dangerous ideologies, but the motivations and strategies of those throughout history who have kept them at bay.
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.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
