Wiener Library Workshop: Introduction to Holocaust Studies through the Records of the International Tracing Service

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Monday, 4 November, 2013

The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Centre for Advanced Holocaust Studies

In October, the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide, in partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Centre for Advanced Holocaust Studies (CAHS), successfully hosted the informative seminar, Introduction to Holocaust Studies through the International Tracing Service (ITS) Collection at the Wiener Library.

Designed for advanced undergraduate, master’s-level and first-year PhD students, the week long workshop gave it’s twelve participants the training and background needed in order to utilise the ITS for original academic research. Students from various relevant academic disciplines took part and received one to one assistance; seminars from the Wiener Library’s experienced archivists, personal access to the ITS and the opportunity to meet some of the people behind the running and formation of the ITS. The Students are working on projects ranging from examining DP camps in Cyprus to forced labour in Wupperta,l to issues of Holocaust memory, amongst others.

Among the speakers were:

  • Dr Suzanne Brown-Fleming (USHMM) who presented research on a small town in Germany which exposed the shocking extent to which forced and slave labour were part and parcel of German life under the Nazis. 
  • Dr Gabor Kadar spoke about recent research on war-time Hungary and the role of Admiral Horthy in the Holocaust; 
  • Dr Rebecca Boehling, Director of the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, spoke about the history and present functioning of ITS.
  • Mr Paul Shapiro, Director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at USHMM, described the long campaign to open ITS to private and scholarly researchers, a campaign in which he had been a central player. 
  • Holocaust survivor Eugene Black spoke of his experiences as a prisoner in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Mittelbau-Dora and Bergen-Belsen, and how he came to discover the fate of his sisters by visiting the ITS archive in Bad Arolsen in 2008.

The workshop, which was organised by The Wiener Library’s Dr Christine Schmidt, reinforced the vast potential of the ITS collections as a resource for new research on the Holocaust and has received high praise from those involved.

 The digital copy of the International Tracing Service Archive at The Wiener Library is supported by the UK Foreign Office, the UK Department for Communities and Local Government, the Heritage Lottery Fund and private donors.