Individual Article:
One man’s collection tells the story of this horrific event
The Crown Family Center for Jewish Studies fosters research and offers courses on the Holocaust, the most catastrophic event in modern Jewish history. To support this area of study, the Library has acquired "Testaments to the Holocaust," a collection that helps document the period between the Weimar Republic and the end of World War II (1920s to 1945). The collection is a testament to the determination of one man, Alfred Wiener, who lived in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s. Unusually prescient, Wiener collected and saved an enormous number of materials ranging from photographs to newspaper clippings. Though he was not a librarian or historian, he created the Wiener Library, a meticulously organized archive that grew to fill countless file cabinets, bookshelves, and boxes.
When it became clear that Jews had no future in the Germany of the Third Reich, he sent his collection to the Netherlands, and, after that country fell to the Germans, moved it to London. The collection is unique in that it draws on German as well as English, French, and American newspapers. It also contains first-person accounts of events of the time, which were recorded while memories were still fresh and raw. These are supplemented by pieces of Nazi propaganda, including cartoons, children’s textbooks, and letters. The entire collection was purchased by Tel Aviv University in the 1980s and made available to visiting scholars and anyone else interested in the history of this genocide. A special building was constructed to house the collection, which was eventually microfilmed to make it more widely available.
Northwestern University Library has purchased the microfilm – more than 300 rolls – and looks forward to the entire collection being digitized for desktop access. Meanwhile, it occupies a unique place in the documentation of Jewish history under the Third Reich and complements the Pritzker Law Center’s collection of testimony from the Nuremberg War Crime Trials.
Rochelle Elstein