The EHRI Summer School in Paris is in its second week. The summer school has an extensive programme with a mixture of lectures of well-known Holocaust researchers and tours of the Mémorial de la Shoah and several other important archives in Paris.

Dan Michman, Head of the International Institute of Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem and Professor of Modern Jewish History gave a lecture on new perspectives on the emergence of Jewish Ghettos during the Holocaust and on the role of Jewish Councils in Western Europe. 

‘La Shoah n'a pas seulement été le génocide des Juifs, mais le projet nazi de se débarasser une fois pour toute de l'esprit juif, d'éliminer de la terre toute influence, toute trace de la vie juive dans la culture européenne et mondiale. Un projet encore plus radical que des tuer des vivants,’ he said at the Summer School lecture. (The Holocaust was not only the genocide on the Jews, but it was also the nazi project of getting rid of the Jewish spirit once for all, of eliminating from earth, from European culture and worldwide, all influence and signs of the Jewish life. A project much more radical than killing the living.’)

The twelve participants also get a chance to present and discuss their own research projects. Katja Happe, researcher at the University of Freiburg in Germany, presented the document collection ‘The Persecution and Extermination of the European Jews by Nazi Germany 1933–1945’.

The goal of this huge collection in the German language is to publish a comprehensive range of central sources from archives all over the world on the persecution of Jews during the Third Reich, including documents from the perpetrators, as well as testimonies of the victims and relevant material from third parties not directly involved.

This editorial project directed by some leading German historians like Ulrich Herbert, Susanne Heim and Dieter Pohl (and others) is jointly administered by four institutions in Germany: The Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv), the Institute of Contemporary History Munich-Berlin (Institut für Zeitgeschichte), the Chair of Modern History at the University of Freiburg and the Chair of the History of East-Central Europe at the Free University of Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin).

According to Laura Fontana, Shoah Memorial coordinator of the Summer Schools, it is a very impressive project and a very useful tool for researchers and anyone who wants to understand how the persecution of the Jews took place.

Read more about the start of the First EHRI Summer School Paris and the programme.

This week the second EHRI Summer School has started in Munich, Germany. It is led by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte.

On the first photo: standing with the twelve participants, in the middle Dan Michman, sitting to his left, Laura Fontana. On the second photo, Dan Michman gives his lecture. On the third photo, Katja Happe, presenting her project. All photos © Mémorial de la Shoah