In-house Exhibition

Our exhibition, Forgotten Victims: The Nazi Genocide of the Roma and Sinti, draws upon The Wiener Holocaust Library's collections of material on the genocide to uncover the story of this little-known aspect of Nazi persecution. Our archives hold a wide range of relevant materials including eye-witness accounts, photographs, documents and books.

The Wiener Library’s summer exhibition showcases the remarkable work of German Jewish photographer Gerty (Gertrud) Simon, and features many of her original prints from the 1920s and 1930s. Simon was a once-prominent photographer who captured many important political and artistic figures in Weimar Berlin, including Kurt Weill, Lotte Lenya, Käthe Kollwitz, Max Liebermann and Albert Einstein. In the 1930s, as a refugee from Nazism in Britain, Simon rapidly re-established her studio, and portrayed many significant individuals there, such as Sir Kenneth Clark, Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Aneurin Bevan.

During the Holocaust, in camps and in ghettos, the incarcerated documented the facts and gathered evidence. After the war, in a variety of countries and organisations, this work continued, and attention turned towards prosecution of perpetrators and towards prevention of future genocides. The collection of evidence and research was also an important aspect of the huge post-war task of tracing the missing after the Holocaust, and has been a feature of the work of commemorative institutions ever since.

Through the eyewitness accounts gathered shortly after Kristallnacht, the exhibition examines responses to this unprecedented, nation-wide campaign of violence. Never-before-seen documents from the Library’s collection demonstrate German and Austrian Jews’ desperate attempts to flee, in many cases as refugees to Britain.

The Wiener Library’s summer 2018 exhibition explores the history and context of an exhibition held in 1938 at the New Burlington Galleries in London entitled Twentieth Century German Art. 2018 marks the eightieth anniversary of this exhibition, which was the most prominent international response to the Nazi campaign against ‘degenerate’ art. It remains the largest display of twentieth-century German art ever staged in Britain. The show featured over three hundred examples of modern German art, by exactly those artists who had faced persecution in Germany: the exhibition in London in 1938 was an attempt to defend them and their work on a world stage.

Co-curated with Professor Dan Stone (Royal Holloway, University of London), this exhibition tells the remarkable, little-known story of the agonising search for the missing after the Holocaust. Drawing upon The Wiener Library’s family document collections and its digital copy of the ITS archive, one of the largest document collections related to the Holocaust in the world, the exhibition considers the legacy of the search for descendants of those affected by World War II, and the impact of fates unknown.

During the German occupation of the Channel Islands 1940–1945, many thousands of people were persecuted, including slave labourers, political prisoners and Jews. Their story has been largely omitted from a British narrative of ‘standing alone’ against Nazism and celebrations of British victory over Germany.

Medical experiments conducted on human beings during the Nazi period are often associated with notorious SS doctors and concentration camps. The experiments have been described as ‘pseudo-science’ and viewed as a precursor to the killing centres of the Holocaust.

Originally from Warsaw, artist and illustrator Franciszka Themerson found herself alone in London during the war, separated from her husband, writer and film-maker Stefan Themerson, who was stranded in southern France, and the rest of her family, trapped inside the Warsaw Ghetto.