Shoah Foundation

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The Shoah Foundation , completely Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation called, is a 1994 by US director Steven Spielberg based nonprofit organization in the United States , the survivors of the world and on a large scale descriptions Holocaust on video recorded to make it future generations to be made available as teaching and training material. The idea for this went back to requests from Holocaust survivors during the shooting of Spielberg's film Schindler's List .

In 2006, the Shoah Foundation was transferred to the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles to the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education , which was established there and has now made the collected and archived material available in its Visual History Archive for research and teaching purposes. Since then the foundation has been called the USC Shoah Foundation .

The short term Shoah Foundation is currently partly used as a name for today's Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education and is partly also used for its Visual History Archive .

History, tasks and goals

During the shooting of Spielberg's cinema film Schindler's List in Krakow , numerous Holocaust survivors expressed the wish to tell their life stories in front of a camera and thus preserve it for posterity. The aim of the Shoah Foundation was to record as many interviews as possible with survivors of the Holocaust and victims of the Nazi extermination policy on video. Contemporary witnesses include those who were racially persecuted, such as Jews , Roma and Sinti , as well as those who were politically persecuted and members of other persecuted groups. Conversations with soldiers who took part in the liberation of the camp prisoners and with resistance fighters were also recorded .

A total of almost 52,000 people from 56 countries were interviewed in 32 languages. The interviews have now been completed and comprise discussions lasting around 120,000 hours. This also includes 931 interviews in German . A total of 188 people were interviewed in Austria , 75 people in Switzerland and 674 people in Germany , such as the German Holocaust survivor Ilse Arndt (1913–2003), who was forcibly sterilized in Auschwitz .

The interviews also include a few survivors of the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and the Nanking massacre in 1937.

In 2006 the Shoah Foundation became part of the University of Southern California (USC), where the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education was established. After completion of the interview phase, the video material was digitized , tagged and made usable via an archiving system in order to pass on the knowledge it contained. The nearly 52,000 video interviews were made accessible via the Visual History Archive created by the institute , whereby the cataloging and indexing made enables a differentiated search for different points of view.

The interviews with contemporary witnesses were conducted as visual history analogous to the historical method of oral history by specially trained interviewers and recorded by specially trained cameramen . The Shoah Foundation Institute pursues didactic goals with the use of video as a medium for the Visual History Archive. According to its own statement, the institute "provides easier access to history for the audiovisual-oriented youth [...] and thus communicates tolerance and human rights education [...] ] wants to promote ”.

Since 1999 the Austrian memorial service can be done at the Shoah Foundation .

In Germany, the Free University of Berlin (FU Berlin) has made the material available online since December 2006 with the help of its Center for Digital Systems (CeDiS) . It is the first university outside the USA to allow access to the University of California's database , on whose servers the archive is located.

In Austria, after unsuccessful attempts at cooperation, the University of Vienna has had its own access since 2014 . Required data is fetched from California and temporarily stored on a local server.

Literature (selection)

  • Marion Aberle: History of the persecution of the Jews for the multimedia generation . In: FAZ, July 5, 1996
  • Judith Decker: Zachor! - remember! Shoah Foundation in Germany . In: grandstand. Journal for the Understanding of Judaism . 35th year, issue 139, 3rd quarter 1996
  • Hans-Joachim Neubauer: Questions make history. Ways to Remembrance for Witnesses to the Holocaust . In: FAZ, November 6, 1996
  • Ulrich Raulff : last source. The Holocaust in the light of the fin de siècle . In: FAZ, April 4, 1997
  • Hollywood Conscience : In: Focus, June 15, 1998
  • Gabriele Chwallek, Hollywood- style effects. Spielberg's Shoah Visual History Foundation has come under fire. In: Allgemeine Jüdische Wochenzeitung, June 25, 1998
  • Henryk M. Broder : Shoa Foundation: Holocaust with a happy ending? Steven Spielberg's videos of survivors are supposed to free Germans from feeling guilty . In: Der Tagesspiegel, October 5, 1999.
  • Eva Menasse : The Testament of the Fifty Thousand. Steven Spielberg and the Shoah Foundation . In: FAZ, January 15, 2000.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b c Origin and goals of the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education at the University of Southern California. (No longer available online.) In: USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. Free University of Berlin , November 4, 2009, archived from the original on November 11, 2007 ; Retrieved March 18, 2010 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.vha.fu-berlin.de
  2. Numbers and facts. (No longer available online.) In: USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. Free University of Berlin, July 31, 2008, archived from the original on November 11, 2007 ; Retrieved March 18, 2010 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.vha.fu-berlin.de
  3. a b Marlene Nowotny: 50,000 Schoah interviews now also in Vienna. In: science.orf.at. April 8, 2014, accessed April 9, 2014 .
  4. ^ The Visual History Archive. In: USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. Free University of Berlin, November 4, 2009, accessed on March 18, 2010 .
  5. ^ "Visual History". (No longer available online.) In: USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. Free University of Berlin, November 19, 2009, archived from the original on July 27, 2013 ; Retrieved March 18, 2010 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.vha.fu-berlin.de

Coordinates: 34 ° 1 ′ 13.7 ″  N , 118 ° 16 ′ 59.8 ″  W.