Vienna Library

The Wiener Library , named after Alfred Wiener , today The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, is an institution for Holocaust research founded in 1933 with headquarters in London . The current director is Ben Barkow .

history

The library was founded by Alfred Wiener together with David Cohen , a member of the Amsterdam Jewish community, as the “Jewish Central Information Office” (JCIO) in Amsterdam to provide information about the persecution of Jews by the National Socialists . Wiener was employed by the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith , a predecessor organization of the Reich Representation of German Jews , before he exiled to Amsterdam in 1933.

In 1936 the institution acquired the archives of the NSDAP / AO national group Spain, which had fallen into the hands of government troops in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War . The material was used by the JCIO in a number of anti-Nazi publications. Three events in particular were commented on: the Bern trial of distributors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion , the murder of Wilhelm Gustloff by the Jew David Frankfurter and the November pogrom of 1938 .

In 1939 the Dutch government limited the publications of the JCIO, so the founders decided to move the collection of the information center to London. After Wiener had brought the material to safety in London, employees of the Jewish Central Information Office destroyed all remaining letters and documents on the day of the German invasion of the Netherlands on May 10, 1940.

In London it was made available to the British SOE , other allied secret services as well as the BBC , at that time part of the Ministry of Information , and other press agencies. The collection was soon known as “Dr. Wieners Library ”. After the end of the Second World War , the collection was converted into a research institute with a public library. Your best-known series of publications was now the “Wiener Library Bulletin”, which appeared every two months from 1946 to 1983. The information and documents about National Socialism and the “ Third Reich ” formed the basis for the charges at the Nuremberg trials .

The collection includes reports from eyewitnesses at the time who began to systematically document interviews immediately after the end of the war. In 1964 the “Institute of Contemporary History” was set up to research the development of Europe as a whole.

After financing problems in 1974 it was planned to relocate the Wiener Library to Tel Aviv . In the course of this relocation, a large part of the collection was archived on microfilm . However, the relocation of the holdings was not completed, so that today there is a separate Viennese collection at the library of Tel Aviv University , most of which has the holdings of the Wiener Library at that time, while the microfilm copies are in the possession of the Wiener Library in London .

Today's “The Vienna Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide” in London deals with the study of the Holocaust , German Jewry under National Socialism, as well as anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism .

On April 21, 2017, the library released 900 gigabytes of data documenting how Allies handled war crimes from 1943 to 1949. Dan Plesch, director of the Institute for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London, asked the UN archives to release the documents of the War Crimes Commission ( UNWCC ). Historians previously required the approval of their government or the UN Secretary-General to evaluate these documents in the archives of the United Nations in New York. Even then, they couldn't make copies or notes. "Most of the books written about war crimes trials ignore the UN War Crimes Commission," explains Ben Barkow, director of the Vienna Library. Since April 21, 2017, this processing has been possible online through the Wiener Library .

In Germany via was DFG - national license the database Testaments to the Holocaust made available with digitized records and rare printed material from the Wiener Library. The digital collection contains personal testimonies to life in the German Reich from 1933 to 1945 , documents on domestic politics, on Jewish life in Germany from 1933 to the post-war period as well as in the concentration camps , in the underground and in exile from the library. The majority of the documents are in German.

A branch of the Wiener Library has been located in the Jewish Museum Berlin since 2008 .

See also

• Austrian memorial service
• Philipp Manes
• Stephen Roth Institute

literature

• Ben Barkow : Alfred Wiener and the making of the Holocaust Library. Vallentine Mitchell, London 1997, ISBN 0-85-303328-5 (English)
• Ben Barkow: Vienna Library. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 6: Ta-Z. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2015, ISBN 978-3-476-02506-7 , pp. 404-408.
• Raphael Gross: The disaster before the disaster . In: FAZ of November 8, 2008 (also online)

Web links

• Vienna Library London
• Viennese collection at Tel Aviv University
• Austrian memorial service at the Wiener Library
• Action Reconciliation for Peace Services at the Wiener Library
• History and tasks of the Wiener Library

Coordinates: 51 ° 31 ′ 20.5 "  N , 0 ° 8 ′ 41.4"  W.

Individual evidence

1. ^ F. Spielhagen: Spies and Conspirators in Spain . Paris, 1936; Black and red book. Documents on Hitler's Imperialism , Barcelona, ​​1937; The Nazi Conspiracy in Spain , London, 1937; Comité Nacional de la CNT: El Nazismo al Desnudo , Barcelona, ​​1938; OK Simon: Hitler en Espagne
2. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from January 7, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) 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. 
3. ^ "Testaments to the Holocaust - National Licenses". Accessed May 23, 2017. http://www.nationallzenzen.de/angebote/nlproduct.2006-03-20.9245808072 .