Joseph Wulf

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Memorial plaque on the house at Giesebrechtstrasse 12 in Berlin-Charlottenburg

Joseph Wulf (born December 22, 1912 in Chemnitz ; died October 10, 1974 in Berlin-Charlottenburg ) was a German-Polish Jewish historian and Holocaust survivor.

Life

Joseph Wulf was born into a Polish-Jewish family and grew up in Krakow . He trained as a rabbi at the Jewish university there .

After the German occupation of Poland in World War II , Wulf's family was deported to the Krakow ghetto in 1940 . There, Joseph joined a Jewish resistance group . In 1943 he was brought to Auschwitz concentration camp , which he survived, and was able to escape on one of the death marches shortly before the end of the war .

After the war ended, Wulf initially stayed in Poland, where he was an executive member of the Central Jewish Historical Commission from 1945 to 1947 . In the summer of 1947 he emigrated to Paris with Michał Borwicz - also an executive member of the “Central Jewish Historical Commission” - where he founded the Center pour l'Histoire des Juifs Polonais (“Center for the History of Polish Jews”).

Later he tried (living in Berlin since 1952) as an employee of the "Federal Center for Homeland Service" in Bonn (today's Federal Center for Civic Education ) as one of the first to provide German society with comprehensive information about the crimes of National Socialism and the Holocaust. He published numerous books. Above all, his documentations on certain topics of the "Third Reich" were groundbreaking and had a strong influence on politics. Attempts to accommodate former National Socialists in the Foreign Office in the early 1950s were severely disrupted with the help of his publications. These are studies that are still used today. For example, the Independent Commission of Historians - Foreign Office relied on its documentation in its 2010 study The Office . In 1965 Wulf started activities to set up a documentation center in the Berlin villa of the Wannsee Conference . However, the Berlin Senate refused any support for this project. The project was controversial even among former opponents of the Nazi regime . For example, the prominent Berlin provost Heinrich Grüber - he was awarded the Carl von Ossietzky Medal one year after Joseph Wulf (1964) - spoke out against the use of the villa as a documentation center.

In the society of the "economic miracle" Wulf met with little response - despite several awards such as the Leo Baeck Prize (1961), the Heinrich Stahl Prize (1967) and the award of an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Berlin ; He was not appointed by any academic institute to work continuously in his field. He remained an outsider among researchers about the “Third Reich”. He was accused of being biased because he was one of the victims of the “Third Reich”. His relationship with the Munich Institute for Contemporary History and its director Martin Broszat , NSDAP member from 1944 onwards, was particularly conflicting . Only after his death in the 1970s did his work find recognition among Nazi researchers and the reading public.

Deeply traumatized by the camp experiences, lonely after the death of his wife and disappointed by the lack of interest, Wulf died on October 10, 1974 by suicide . In his last letter to his son David on August 2, 1974, he wrote down a list of his disappointments, for example “9. I know that after 1945 Ilya Ehrenburg wrote an 'In memoriam' for the murdered Jews and the Soviet Union did not allow the book to appear ” and “ I published 18 books here about the Third Reich, and none of them had any Effect. You can document yourself dead with the Germans, it can be the most democratic government in Bonn - and the mass murderers go around freely, have their houses and grow flowers. "

A few years later his books were very popular and new editions were regularly made.

Appreciations

Wulf's pioneering role in Nazi research has only been recognized for a few years ; This is how the media library of the Documentation Center and Museum Haus der Wannsee Conference established in 1992 bears his name. Because Joseph Wulf is actually the initiator of this facility, which finally opened in 1988. He is also remembered in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. His last letter is presented here.

In the Berlin exhibition Crime and Enlightenment. The first generation of Holocaust research , which was developed by the Memorial and Educational Center Haus der Wannsee Conference and the Touro College Berlin and will be shown in the Haus am Werderscher Markt in January / February 2019 , is presented to Joseph Wulf as one of 20 pioneers in Holocaust research .

Publications (selection)

Please sort by time of publication.

  • The Third Reich and the Jews. Documents and essays. Together with Léon Poliakov . Arani, Berlin 1955. Various new editions as hardcover, most recently Fourier, Wiesbaden 1987. As paperback a. a. at Ullstein, Berlin 1983, ISBN 3-548-33036-3 .
  • The Third Reich and its servants. With Léon Poliakov. Arani, Berlin 1956. Also in Volk und Welt, Berlin-Ost 1975. As a paperback a. a. Ullstein 1983.
  • About life, struggle and death in the Warsaw Ghetto. Federal Center for Homeland Service , Bonn 1958.
  • The Third Reich and its thinkers. Documents. With Leon Poliakov. Arani, Berlin 1959. Paperback edition a. a. at Ullstein 1983.
  • The Nuremberg Laws. Arani Verlag, Berlin 1960.
  • Heinrich Himmler - A biographical study. Arani, Berlin 1960.
  • The Third Reich and its Executors - The Liquidation of 500,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto . Arani, Berlin 1961.
  • Martin Bormann - Hitler's shadow. Sigbert Mohn, Gütersloh 1962.
  • Lodz, the last ghetto on Polish soil. Federal Center for Homeland Service, Bonn 1962.
  • From the lexicon of murderers. Sigbert Mohn, Gütersloh 1963.
  • Music in the Third Reich. Sigbert Mohn, Gütersloh 1963. As paperback: Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-550-07059-4 .
  • The fine arts in the Third Reich. Sigbert Mohn, Gütersloh 1963. Various paperback editions, a. a. near Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-550-07057-8 (= Culture in the Third Reich DNB 551499583 ).
  • Literature and Poetry in the Third Reich. Sigbert Mohn, Gütersloh 1963; various new editions as paperback u. a .: Literature and poetry in the Third Reich. A documentation. Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Vienna 1983, ISBN 3-550-07056-X .
  • Theater and Film in the Third Reich. Mohn, Gütersloh 1963. Various paperback editions.
  • Press and radio in the Third Reich. Sigbert Mohn, Gütersloh 1964. Also later paperback editions.
  • Raoul Wallenberg : Il fut leur espérance. Casterman, Paris / Tournai 1968 DNB 578442264 (first German, Colloquium, Berlin 1958 DNB 455769060 in: Heads of the XXth Century. Volume 9 ISSN  0454-1383 ).
  • Ernst Jünger –Joseph Wulf: The correspondence. 1962-1974 . Edited by Anja Keith, Detlev Schöttker, Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 2019, ISBN 978-3-465-04380-5 .

estate

literature

Movie

  • Henryk M. Broder: Joseph Wulf. A writer in Germany. Documentary, 1981 (also as TV version 1980/81)). With numerous Interviews. There is also a program sheet: Who was Joseph Wulf? (with the same title: JW in Frankfurter Rundschau , October 24, 1981

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes, Moshe Zimmermann: The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic. Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-89667-430-2 , p. 586 f.
  2. ↑ see homepage of the Joseph-Wulf-Mediothek
  3. ↑ Crime and Enlightenment. The first generation of Holocaust research , on the website of the Federal Foreign Office , accessed on January 30, 2019.
  4. ↑ Sachor = Remember
  5. ↑ Broder's collection of material on which this film is based now in Germania Judaica
personal data
SURNAME Wulf, Joseph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Polish historian and Holocaust survivor
DATE OF BIRTH December 22, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Chemnitz
DATE OF DEATH October 10, 1974
Place of death Berlin-Charlottenburg