‘New way of bearing witness': one of biggest Holocaust archives goes online

The Guardian

27-01-2025

One of the world's largest Holocaust archives is accessible online for the first time after a three-year digitisation of much of the collection.
Announced on Holocaust Memorial Day, the Wiener Holocaust Library's new online platform includes more than 150,000 items collected over nine decades. Users can view letters, pamphlets and photographs that record the rise of fascism in Britain and Europe.
The director of the library, Dr Toby Simpson, said the project had been in the works for more than 10 years and he hoped it would help it find a new audience of scholars and become a 'new way of bearing witness in the digital age'.
Some of the most fascinating items are Tarnschriften or 'hidden writings' – anti-fascist propaganda hidden in everyday items including powder shampoo and tea leaves. Concealed in luggage and smuggled across borders into Germany, the writing was one of the few ways for Germans to become aware of the Nazis' activities.
'They're camouflaged anti-Nazi pamphlets,' said Simpson. 'They wanted to get the message into Germany, it was impossible for people to get that literature from any other source. If anyone was caught with anti-Nazi material they could be beaten up or arrested by the Gestapo.'
He added: 'The disguises were incredibly elaborate, one included instructions for how to take care of your cactus. The hope was that if your luggage was searched on the train they would hopefully just pass over it and not realise what you were carrying.'
Each year the library receives about 50 collections, which can range from a few letters donated by individuals to entire archives, such as the dozens of boxes of material it received from the Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad, an organisation that helped displaced people.
The digitisation process has given the museum a chance to review material it has long held, uncovering stories that have laid in the archive perhaps untouched for decades.
'There have been nine decades and in each of those decades society's understanding of the Holocaust has evolved over time and this collection is a chronicle of that process,' said Simpson. 'Often the story of how the material came to us is as interesting as the items themselves.'
Within the collection are items that cover the activities of British fascists, such as Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, and the anti-fascist movement that took on the far-right threat in Britain before and after the second world war.
'We have to be a bit careful because some of these groups are still active, so there are downloading restrictions in place, but we think it's important for people to be able to use these documents to investigate this history because it's too little understood,' Simpson said.
There are items from the German occupation of British territory, including a reward card from one of the Nazi commandants in Jersey for anyone willing to inform on their neighbours.
'We ask ourselves what we would have done in similar circumstances and there's something about seeing something in your own language that makes it more immediate,' said Simpson.
One of the items the library is most excited about is a logbook from the office of Thomas Cook in Lisbon, Portugal, which became a key route for Jewish refugees who fled central and eastern Europe via the Pyrenees and the Iberian peninsula.
'People who were trying to get their luggage out would deposit their items with Thomas Cook, so this logbook contains names of those who were using that route. It's completely unique.'
The digitisation process means the logbook is easily searchable for people looking for family members they suspect may have escaped using that route.
Simpson said: 'We're just at the beginning of the connections we can make, because descendants may find out new information about what happened to their families or trace items that were lost.'
The Wiener Library was founded 90 years ago by Dr Alfred Wiener, who campaigned against nazism during the 1920s and 30s and gathered evidence about antisemitism and the persecution of Jews in Germany. It was originally called the Jewish Central Information Office and was based in Amsterdam before moving to London in 1938.