Over 150,000 historic documents and photographs recording the Holocaust and resistance to Nazism have been published online in an important new collection.
The Wiener Holocaust Library in London launched Wiener Digital Collections, a new digital portal to its archives, on 27 January – Holocaust Memorial Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
In 1934 Dr Alfred Wiener, a German Jew who had fled the Nazis to Amsterdam, set up the Jewish Central Information Office (JCIO) with the aim of collecting information about Nazi persecution of the Jews. In 1938 he fled from the Netherlands to Britain. The JCIO became the Wiener Holocaust Library, now one of the world’s leading archives on the Holocaust, the Nazi era and genocide.
Dr Toby Simpson, director of the 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.”
Records available on Wiener Digital Collections include photographs of the Holocaust, ghettos such as Łódź ghetto, and concentration camps.
It also holds documents from the Nuremberg trials, used to prosecute the architects of the Holocaust.
In addition, it contains records of fascist and anti-fascist movements in the UK, including the rise of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) and the 1936 Battle of Cable Street, a clash between the BUF, the Metropolitan Police and anti-fascist groups.
The Wiener Holocaust Library said it will continue to add documents to the website at a rate of 100,000 pages a year.
