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Holocaust Studies

Databases and websites relevant for the research in Holocaust Studies

Collection of primary resources

  • The Archives Branch of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. One of the world’s largest and most comprehensive repositories of Holocaust-related records.
  • Archives of the Holocaust. Facsimiles of selected documents relating to the Holocaust from the National Archives of Canada and the Canadian Jewish Archives.
  • Arolsen Archives The world most comprehensive archive on National Socialist persecution. Information on victims of the Holocaust and concentration camp prisoners, on foreign forced laborers and on the survivors who were trying to rebuild their lives as displaced persons.
  • Bearing Witness : A Resource Guide to Literature, Poetry, Art, Music & Videos by Holocaust Victims & Survivors
  • Centropa. A Jewish historical institute dedicated to preserving 20th century Jewish family stories from Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
  • Claims Conference/WJRO. Looted Art and Cultural Property Initiative. 
  • The destruction of Hungarian Jewry : a documentary account. Documents the destruction of the Hungarian Jewish community in 1944. Volume I covers the treatment of Hungarian Jews from 1940 until the Nazi occupation and volume II covers the roundups and deportations of March-April, 1944. Presents reproductions of the original sources. Includes an analytical list of documents.
  • Documents of destruction; Germany and Jewry, 1933-1945. Compendium of translated documents outlining the history of the Holocaust, from decrees of the early days of the Third Reich through documents concerning the postwar fate of perpetrators.
  • Documents on the Holocaust : selected sources on the destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union. Compiles translations of over 200 sources documenting the destruction of Jewish communities under the Nazis. Compiles official decrees, speeches, military orders, diary excerpts, and other primary sources. Includes indexes of names, places, organizations, and individuals.
  • Donovan Nuremberg Trials Collection. Nuremberg trial transcripts and documents from the Collection of General William J. Donovan.
  • EuroDocs. A collection of links to European primary historical documents that are transcribed, reproduced in facsimile, or translated.
  • European Holocaust Research Institute (EHRI) This portal  offers access to information on Holocaust-related archival material held in institutions across Europe and beyond. 
  • Experiencing History: Holocaust Sources in Context. A resource for instructors and students divided into thematic sections. To access it, create a free account.
  • Fortunoff video archive for Holocaust testimonies. A collection of over 4,400 videotaped interviews with witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust. Yale University Library.
  • Google Cultural Institute. A digital visual archive of landmark 20th century events and personalities, like Anne Frank House, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and Yad Vashem.
  • Hitler and the Nazis: a history in documents. Collection of documents in translation and images covering the collapse of the Weimar Republic and Hitler’s rise to power, World War II, and the Holocaust.
  • The Holocaust. Presents translations for over 100 documents, including letters, diary excerpts, Nazi reports, and survivor testimonies, which trace the history of the Holocaust from the rise of Nazism through the liberation of the camps.
  • Holocaust Denial on Trial. This site counteract misinformation and falsehoods spread by Holocaust deniers.
  • The Holocaust : selected documents in eighteen volumes. Each volume is composed of facsimiles of essential records of the Holocaust, in most of its aspects from 1933 to 1945, arranged both topically and chronologically.
  • Inside Hitler’s Germany : a documentary history of life in the Third Reich. Primary source documents tracing the political and social history of Nazi Germany, from the origins of National Socialism in the years after World War I through the establishment of the Third Reich and the Holocaust.
  • JDC archives provides access to over 1,7 million pages and photographs from its founding in 1917 to the present. 
  • Jewish underground resistance : the David Diamant collection. This collection consists of original documents collected by Diamant over a period of approximately 30 years dealing primarily with the Jewish segment of the French underground resistance; many of the documents originate with communist groups, and some deal with Polish groups.
  • Leo Baeck Institute. Their online collection includes archival manuscripts, memoirs, books and periodicals as well as audio recording.
  • Mémoire juive et éducation. Des textes, des témoignages et des documents sur la Shoah.
  • The Nazi concentration camps, 1933-1939 : a documentary history. This collection brings together revealing primary documents on the crucial origins of the Nazi concentration camp system in the prewar years between 1933 and 1939.
  • The Nazi Germany sourcebook: an anthology of texts. Translations of 148 documents, including some never before published in English, covering the rise of Nazism through the Holocaust and the following decades. Contains diplomatic records, minutes of meetings, diary excerpts, speeches, and eyewitness accounts.
  • Nazism, 1919-1945. The rise and fall of Nazism from the movement’s founding through World War II. Interweaves translated excerpts from hundreds of primary documents.
  • The Nuremberg Trials Project. An open-access initiative by Harvard Law School Library to create and present digitized images or full-text versions of the Library's Nuremberg documents and trials.
  • The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. The Avalon Project, Yale Law School. Full-text access to the multivolume sets of the Nuremberg trial proceedings and transcripts originally published by the International Military Tribunal. Includes translations of many important Holocaust-related documents, such as the Stroop Report, the Warsaw Protocol, and the Night and Fog Decree.
  • The Online Wiener Archive. This documentation, collected by Dr. Alfred Wiener and his team before, during and after the Second World War and the Holocaust, includes official correspondences of the Nazi authorities in the 1930s and 1940s; official records from concentration camps; official records of Jewish organizations; personal letters which shed light on the condition of the Jews in occupied Europe and more.
  • The Roman Vishniac Collection. A collection of images of Jewish life in Europe before the Holocaust, documenting a world that would soon vanish. Vishniac also chronicled the rise of Nazism and the aftermath of World War II.
  • Sources of the Holocaust. Collects 84 translations of original documents, including letters, postwar depositions, speeches, diary excerpts, Nazi reports, and newspaper articles, which outline the history of the Holocaust.
  • Testaments to the Holocaust. It builds a history of the period through people’s testimonies, family narratives and the documents of the activities of the Nazi regime.
  • Visual History Archive.USC Shoah Foundation’s online portal that allows users to search through and view more than 55,000 video testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide.
  • Witness to the Holocaust. Documentary history of the Holocaust. Presents translated excerpts of key documents, speeches, announcements, letters, and reports, chronologically presented with commentary to provide context for each item.
  • Yad Vashem. Established in 1953, as the world center for documentation, research, education and commemoration of the Holocaust.

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Sonia Smith
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McGill University
Nahum Gelber Law Library
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Subjects: Jewish studies, Law

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