Thousands of Jews throughout Europe, facing a shrinking universe of options and increasingly desperate circumstances, wrote to the representatives of the very governments that were persecuting them to ask for clemency from anti-Semitic measures during the Holocaust. They employed a variety of rhetorical strategies in their appeals, hoping that their words would be sufficiently convincing Read More
Category: State and Perpetrator Documents
The Lost Jews of Stettin: A Revealing Letter from 1942
For the past four years, I’ve been working with Harvard Law School’s extensive collection of documents from all 13 Nuremberg trials. My role is to create metadata for prosecution and defense exhibits (and source documents) so that future searchers will be able to find each item when the whole collection is online. The collection has Read More
“It is Folly not to do Anything, Even if one can not do Everything”
Introduction On August 19, 1944, a quite extraordinary thing happened in Hungary, which had been under German occupation for five months already. Dr János Benedek, the főszolgabíró 1 of the Kiskőrös district ordered the internment of István Velich, the agricultural officer of the district and local functionary of the Eastern Frontline Companions’ Association (Keleti Arcvonal Read More
Pecunia Olet: Aryanizing Jewish Shops in Gödöllő, Hungary
Intro In March 1942, the town council of Gödöllő decided to cancel the rent of those Jewish shopkeepers whose shops were located on the ground floor of the city hall. During the preparations, the council ordered a drawing of the ground plan of the city hall, which served as a market area at that time. Read More
Transports from Mechelen
To commemorate the 75th anniversary of the deportations to the East from the central assembly camp in Belgium for Jews, Roma and Sinti Kazerne Dossin started a series of online publications to mark these events. Around the date of departure of the convoy two personal stories per transport were written to lift the historical facts Read More
“Re-Germanization” and the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle Camps: The Geography of Expulsion
“Extermination and assimilation were two sides of the same coin.”1 The author of this alarming phrase is one of the very few scholars who have written in English2 about the ‘re-Germanization” program run in part by the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (Ethnic German Liaison Office, an SS agency set up to take care of the needs of Read More
Forced Labourers and the Water Works Camps in the Lublin District
Depicting non-industrial forced labour: The example of water works camps in the Lublin district The photograph depicts a rarely discussed topic in Holocaust historiography: The daily life of Jewish forced labourers in early water works camps (Wasserwirtschaftslager) in the Lublin District. The series of photographs from the archives of the Institute of National Remembrance at Read More
Online Finding Aid on Nazi Camp History
An old finding aid regarding general information on incarceration and persecution sites of the Nazi Regime was published on the EHRI portal in May 2016. The physical finding aid – a card index – had been gradually compiled between the years 1970 and 1982 and had served primarily as a search tool for ITS staff Read More
Card File of the Jewish Population in the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia
Preserved remnants of registration card files of Jews in the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia open important questions of the state of Holocaust documentation as well as of the deployment of modern technology in registering and deporting European Jews. This post analyses the history and structure of the WWII central card file held today at the Read More
