(27 Jan 2025) 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.
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.
Find out more here.
