The Wiener Library’s new temporary exhibition ‘Crimes Uncovered: The First Generation of Holocaust Researchers’ will offer people the unique opportunity to view original documents from the Library’s extensive archive collection, including some of the earliest eye-witness testimonies from Holocaust survivors every to be recorded.

This exhibition reveals the stories and legacies of the individuals and institutions who first collected evidence of the crimes of the Holocaust: from those who carried out this imperative work as genocide unfolded around them, to those who much later pursued justice and remembrance. The evidence collated by the individuals featured within this exhibit would go on to form some of the most crucial evidence in bringing the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice during the post-war years. Under the most adverse conditions and often against indifference, denunciation and violence, the extraordinary ‘first generation’ of Holocaust researchers shaped the foundation of our current knowledge of the Holocaust.

Commemorating the life and work of some of these pioneers of Holocaust research we share and celebrate, among 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; Filip Müller, who collected evidence of the Nazi crimes being committed whilst imprisoned in Auschwitz – this evidence was smuggled out of the camp and formed the basis of ‘The Auschwitz Protocols’; 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: The First Generation of Holocaust Researchers’ is on at The Wiener Library from 27^th February – 17^th May 2019.

Visit our website for further details: https://www.wienerlibrary.co.uk/crimes-uncovered

Image: Louis de Jong, founder of NIOD (the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam), examining documents on the Holocaust post-war, © Nationaal Archief / Collection Spaarnestad Photo.