For the first time in English, a new publication by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum documents the mass murder of Soviet POWs by Nazi Germany's armed forces, the Wehrmacht. The latest volume of the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, which also describes the extent of the Wehrmacht camp system, contains testimony not previously published.
The conference, organized to mark the 80th anniversary of Operation Reinhardt, seeks to present the newest research on the Holocaust in Poland. Although the Nazi operation to exterminate Jews in German-occuppied central Poland between 1942–1943 remains the primary focus, the organisers are interested in the wider process of the destruction of Jews from 1941 until 1945 within the territory of the pre-war Second Polish Republic.
By Karel Berkhoff, co-Project Director EHRI and NIOD
As a research infrastructure devoted to the study of genocide and war, EHRI is shocked that an unprovoked and inexcusable attack on a sovereign country is possible in Europe in the 21st century and has issued a statement condemning Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine. It is often argued that to make sense of the present, one must understand the past. This is certainly true for the war that is now raging in Ukraine. For this reason, we would like to bring to your attention the chapter The Holocaust in Ukraine of the EHRI Online Course in Holocaust Studies, launched in 2015. Filled with source material in original languages and in English translations, and background information about sources and the historiography, it gives insights into a dark episode that still resonates today, and that is distorted by those who do not wish Ukraine well. Although EHRI’s primary impact is scientific, it also hopes that Holocaust research and a better understanding of the past, will help to build foundations for open and non-discriminatory societies across Europe and beyond.
By Richelle Budd Caplan, Yad Vashem
The Holocaust (Shoah) was an unprecedented genocide, perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, with the aim of annihilating the Jewish people. The primary motivation was the Nazis’ antisemitic racist ideology. Between 1933 and 1941, Nazi Germany pursued a policy that dispossessed the Jews of their rights and their property, followed by the branding and concentration of the Jewish population. This policy gained broad support in Germany and much of occupied Europe. In 1941, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazis and their collaborators launched the systematic mass murder of the Jews. By 1945 nearly six million Jews had been murdered.
Recently the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance published Guidelines for Identifying Relevant Documentation for Holocaust Research, Education and Remembrance. An online event, hosted on Wednesday, 23 March, introduced these new guidelines for the first time to the general public. A number of EHRI-affiliated experts presented and participated in these proceedings.
By dr Agnieszka Haska, Polish Center for Holocaust Research
“I am writing hastily, thinking that these pages will one day be found in a liberated Warsaw.”
This is a final sentence from a testimony written in June 1943 in the attic of one of the houses in Warsaw, where the author was hiding with her son after leaving the ghetto. She was writing at night, trying to recollect everything that happened to Warsaw Jews during German occupation and “render the picture precisely'' in a very impersonal manner. She also anonymized her testimony quite thoroughly – partially because of safety reasons, but one can also assume that it was her intention to make the narrative more universal, more objective. There is very little information the author is revealing about herself in the text – no names and surnames, no exact addresses in the ghetto -, only street names and the profession of her husband (doctor).
By Michala Lônčíková, Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences
On March 23, a pilot EHRI Webinar was launched by our Work Package 10 (Thematic Layers across collections), the team which is also behind the EHRI Document Blog. This very first webinar, Social Networks and Surviving the Holocaust, was presented by Štěpán Jurajda, Mellon Endowment Professor with Tenure at the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education – Economics Institute (CERGE-EI) in Prague, Czech Republic. During the webinar, he acquainted the audience with the key findings of the statistical research on the social contacts of the Holocaust survivors, that he conducted together with Matěj Bělín (CERGE-EI) and Tomáš Jelínek (Moravian Business College Olomouc).
Judith was an EHRI Conny Kristel Fellow at the Federal Archives in Berlin (March 2022), the Wiener Holocaust Library in London (January 2019) and the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw (September 2018).
By Judith Vöcker
The EHRI Conny Kristel Fellowship has been a red thread throughout my PhD in History at the University of Leicester as I was awarded my first EHRI Fellowship at the beginning of my PhD in September 2018 and January 2019, and now, during my writing up year, a second Conny Kristel Fellowship.
The latest EHR Blogpost, written by Herminio Garcia González, looks at the difficulties many Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) face sharing their collections' meta-data in standardised and sustainable ways due to an absence of in-house IT support or capabilities. Many institutions rely on more familiar programs like text processors, spreadsheets, or low-code databases.
By René van Horik, DANS
The EHRI-Portal is a web application that holds data from different sources. It offers access to information on Holocaust-related archival material held in institutions across Europe and beyond. DANS, the Dutch national centre of expertise and repository for research data, is one of these institutions.
This blog describes how metadata provided by DANS was integrated into the EHRI-Portal. The intention was to create a fully automated “pipeline” between the DANS data catalogue and the EHRI-Portal. Was this even possible?
EHRI partner, the "Elie Wiesel" National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, organizes an innovative educational and remembrance project, encouraging young generations and general audiences to discover the histories of the communities they are living in.
Six different outdoor graphic novel exhibitions, created by the research team of the "Elie Wiesel” Institute, in partnership with high-school students from the cities that host the exhibitions, present the (hi)stories of Jews and Roma who lived in those regions more than eight decades ago.
By Roxana Popa, The "Elie Wiesel" National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust In Romania
"Stories from the Holocaust. Local histories" is a project that frames Holocaust memory in Romania by emphasizing local specificities and boosting local awareness. The programme encourages awareness that the Holocaust is not a story of a distant place but has regional specificity as both the victims and the perpetrators walked the streets of the cities that host the exhibition. Consequently, their story pertains to local history and needs to be acknowledged as such. Taken to a local level, remembrance becomes an active process, and it creates a sense of common belonging with the victims, which nurtures empathy and solidarity.