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Lloyd Sealy Library
John Jay College of Criminal Justice

History: The Holocaust: Links and Resources about the Holocaust

Guide for Library Research on The Holocaust

Yizkor Books

Yizkor Books

"Yizkor books, also known as memorial books, chronicle the lives of Jewish communities destroyed during the Holocaust. These rare books uniquely record the history of the shtetls, cities, or regions of Europe, and are often one of the few remaining sources on a town’s people, as well as its cultural, religious, and social institutions. As such, these works are an invaluable resource for scholars and family historians, providing personal glimpses into Jewish life before, during, and after the Holocaust."

USHMM Memorial Books

JewishGen’s Yizkor Book Project (Some Translations Available)

New York Public Library Yizkor Book Collection (A digitized collection of more than 650 Yizkor books.)

Nuremburg Trials

Nuremburg Trials

Nuremberg Trials Project: Scanned original documents at The Harvard Law School Library.

Nuremberg Trials (1945-1949): https://www.loc.gov/item/2015645417/Library of Congress

Thomas J. Dodd Papers - Nuremberg Trials: Materials from the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, the Storrs Campus of the University of Connecticut. Dodd served as Executive Trial Counsel and supervisor of the U.S. prosecution team at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

Primary Resources

Primary Resources

Andover-Harvard Library: Holocaust Rescue and Relief: Digitized Records of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
"The Andover-Harvard Theological Library is the official archive for the records of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC). In a project jointly funded by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris, the library completed a massive digitization project of roughly 257 boxes of archival UUSC material dating from 1939 to 1967."

Auschwitz through the lens of the SS: Photos of Nazi leadership at the camp:
A photo album most certainly created by SS-Obersturmführer Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz, SS-Sturmbannführer Richard Baer. The photographs depict Höcker and other SS officers in Auschwitz during the summer and fall of 1944. From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

German History in Documents and Images, Nazi Germany
Documents, images and maps from The German Historical Institute

International Military Tribunal for Germany (Nuremberg Trials)
"The Nuremberg Trials were a series of military tribunals, held by the victorious Allied forces of World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of the defeated Nazi Germany. The trials were held in the city of Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany, in 1945–46, at the Palace of Justice. This website provides much of the transcripts that were taken from these trials."

Internet Modern History Sourcebook: The Holocaust
 Part of the Internet Modern History Sourcebook, complied by Fordham University (last updated in 1999).

Judaica Europeana:
Part of the European Project, dedicate to Jewish Studies materials from all over Europe and Israel. Works with cultural institutions to identify and provide access online to content which documents the Jewish presence and heritage in the cities of Europe.

Online Texts and Documents
This site lists text and documents related to Jewish History from thee Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

These recordings are powerful personal accounts of the Holocaust from Jewish survivors living in Britain. The interviews were selected from a much larger oral history project, the Living Memory of the Jewish Community, which recorded testimony between 1988-2000. The project was developed with the specialist advice of leading Jewish historians and complements a number of collections held by the Sound Archive on Jewish life in Britain. - See more at: http://sounds.bl.uk/Oral-history/Jewish-Holocaust-survivors#sthash.CzD39WRg.dpuf
These recordings are powerful personal accounts of the Holocaust from Jewish survivors living in Britain. The interviews were selected from a much larger oral history project, the Living Memory of the Jewish Community, which recorded testimony between 1988-2000. The project was developed with the specialist advice of leading Jewish historians and complements a number of collections held by the Sound Archive on Jewish life in Britain. - See more at: http://sounds.bl.uk/Oral-history/Jewish-Holocaust-survivors#sthash.CzD39WRg.dpuf
These recordings are powerful personal accounts of the Holocaust from Jewish survivors living in Britain. The interviews were selected from a much larger oral history project, the Living Memory of the Jewish Community, which recorded testimony between 1988-2000. The project was developed with the specialist advice of leading Jewish historians and complements a number of collections held by the Sound Archive on Jewish life in Britain. - See more at: http://sounds.bl.uk/Oral-history/Jewish-Holocaust-survivors#sthash.CzD39WRg.dpuf

YIVO Digital Archive on Jewish Life in Poland:
"Highlights from YIVO’s archival collections on Polish Jewry before the Holocaust. It includes thousands of documents, posters, and photographs from the most significant Polish Jewish collections along with detailed finding aids, online exhibitions and media galleries."

Survivor Testimony

Survivor Testimony

British Library Holocaust Recordings
"These recordings are powerful personal accounts of the Holocaust from Jewish survivors living in Britain. The interviews were selected from a much larger oral history project, the Living Memory of the Jewish Community, which recorded testimony between 1988-2000."

Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
"The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies is a collection of over 4,400 videotaped interviews with witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust. Part of Yale University's department of Manuscripts and Archives, the archive is located at Sterling Memorial Library."

Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Archive
"With a current collection of nearly 52,000 eyewitness testimonies, the Visual History Archive preserves history as told by the people who lived it. The Visual History Archive is the largest digital collection of its kind in the world. Currently encompassing 107,723 hours of video testimony, the archive is an invaluable resource containing a complete personal history of life before, during and after the interviewee’s firsthand experience with genocide."

USHMM Oral History
Videos of Holocaust survivors

Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive
"Since 1981, Dr. Sidney Bolkosky, Professor of History at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, has interviewed Holocaust survivors. The University's Mardigian Library has been the repository of these interviews. It has been our privilege to provide a forum for those voices, "listening ears," as one survivor notes, and the facilities to record the testimonies. As a University of distinction, the campus has demonstrated its dignity and character because of the respect it has accorded the tapes and the people who made them."

Voices of the Holocaust
In 1946, Dr. David P. Boder, a psychology professor from Chicago's Illinois Institute of Technology, traveled to Europe to record the stories of Holocaust survivors in their own words. Over a period of three months, he visited refugee camps in France, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, carrying a wire recorder and 200 spools of steel wire, upon which he was able to record over 90 hours of first-hand testimony. These recordings represent the earliest known oral histories of the Holocaust, which are available through this online archive.

Photographs

Photographs
 
Photos were taken by Roman Vishniac (1897-1990) documenting the rise of Nazi power. Photos from 1935 to 1938 are from Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe. Vishniac also photographed Jewish communal and immigrant life in New York during the WWII years, and after the war he returned to Europe to document Jewish displaced persons camps.
 

Online Galleries
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

USHMM Photo Archives
Yad Vashem Photo Archive
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Israel's Yad Vashem both have extensive photo galleries available online.

Links

Anne Frank - The Secret Annex Online
Explore the hiding place of Anne and her family and get to know the stories from her diary.

Anne Frank Center, USA
The Anne Frank Center USA promotes the universal message of tolerance by developing and disseminating a variety of educational programs, including exhibitions, workshops, and special events in its Exhibition and Education Center in New York City.

Coming of Age in the Holocaust
Twelve stories of Holocaust survivors and one story of an individual who grew up in the Israel during the same period. Each story reflects unique, individual experiences, and as a group, the stories provide a library of resources for learning about the Holocaust through personal narratives.

Holocaust Chronicle
This site contains the full text of the book of the same name as well as a selection of the images, providing a detailed history of the atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II.

Holocaust Resource Center and Archives
The Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Center at Queensborough Community College focusing on education, research, and remembrance.

Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation
This site focuses on telling the hidden story of Jewish resistance to the Germans throughout the Holocaust and Second World War.

The Kindertransport Association
"The Kindertransport Association (KTA) is a not-for-profit organization of child holocaust survivors who were sent, without their parents, out of Austria, Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia to Great Britain."

The Voyage of the S.S. St. Louis 
The S.S. St. Louis was a ship of Jewish refugees who left Germanyin 1939 and was refused entry by all countries it approached, including the United States. Public pressure eventually forced some European countries to admit the passengers. Most of them were murdered when the European countries that they were admitted to were conquered by the Germans. This site is put together by a descendent of one of the passengers.

Women of Ravensbrück: Portraits of Courage
"This exhibit looks at the history and background of the Ravensbrück camp, a World War II concentration camp for women. It features stories from several inmates, images of the camp and of prisoner art, and essays on topics such as children, medical experiments, spiritual resistance, and concentration camp cookbooks."