
Wiener Library Collections
This new exhibition traces the stories and the legacies of the individuals and institutions who worked during and immediately after the Holocaust to record and collect information of atrocities and bring perpetrators to justice.
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.
This exhibition reveals, amongst others, the stories of: Emmanuel Ringelblum and Rachel Auerbach, whose Oyneg Shabbos organisation gathered and concealed evidence from inside the Warsaw Ghetto; Raphael Lemkin, who used the information he amassed about the atrocities of the Holocaust to develop the legal concept of genocide; Vasily Grossman, who documented the extermination of Soviet Jews; Alfred Wiener, founder of The Wiener Library, who collected and disseminated evidence of Nazi activities from the mid-1920s onwards, as well as the Library’s Eva Reichmann, who launched one of the earliest projects to collect eye-witness testimonies to the Holocaust.
Crimes Uncovered Event Series
- Talk: Informing the World: How Knowledge of the Holocaust Reached the Western World. Dr Hans-Christian Jasch. 28 February 2019
- Talk: Double Amnesia: Zionism and Human Rights in 1948 and Today. James Loeffler. 4 March 2019
- Book Talk: Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice. Professor Mary Fulbrook. 11 March 2019
- Talk: On Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide. Professor Philippe Sands & Sir Terence Etherton. 29 April 2019
- Panel Disucssion: Early Holocaust Research at The Wiener Library. Dr Christine Schmidt, Madeline White & Chad McDonald. 8 May 2019
Press Coverage
We have been delighted to receive the following press coverage for this exhibition:
- Memoria ‘Crimes Uncovered: The First Generation of Holocaust Researchers’ (February Issue 2019)
- LoveCamden ‘Crimes Uncovered: The First Generation of Holocaust Researchers an exhibition at The Wiener Library’ (04.02.19)
- Oxford Human Rights Blog ‘The Wiener Library’s Exhibition – Crimes Uncovered: The First Generation of Holocaust Researchers’ (22.02.19)
- The Independent ‘The women who risked their lives to uncover the crimes of the Holocaust’ (26.02.19)
- Smithsonian.com ‘These Pioneers Created the First Reliable Record of the Holocaust’ (01.03.19)
- Jewish News ‘Meet the heroes who ensured the Holocaust would never be forgotten’ (05.03.19)
- VICE UK ‘The Prisoners Who Told the World About the Holocaust’ (08.03.19)
- The Jewish Chronicle ‘In praise of the first to tell the world about the Holocaust‘ (14.03.19)
This exhibition is produced in collaboration with the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Touro College Berlin, and with the generous support of The Federal Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany.
