Holocaust library unveils 150,000-piece digital archive for International Memorial Day
The acclaimed Weiner Holocaust Library in London has unveiled a 150,000-piece digital collectiont, the largest of its kind in the world, in honor of International Holocaust Memorial Day.
Image by Wiener Holocaust Library Collections
The acclaimed Weiner Holocaust Library in London on Monday unveiled a 150,000-piece digital collection, the largest of its kind in the world, in honor of International Holocaust Memorial Day.
The never-before-seen lot, made up of “150,000 pages of evidence of the Holocaust and those who resisted it,” is now searchable through a brand-new online portal - the Wiener Digital Collections.
It took the library about three years to digitize the entire archive, which includes “crucial documents, photos, transcripts, and testimonies,” Monday’s announcement states.
The annual remembrance day of January 27th was chosen by the United Nations in 2001, the same date as the liberation of Auschwitz, and also the reason behind Monday’s massive launch of digitized Holocaust history.
“By placing a wealth of evidence freely available online, we are ensuring that the historical record is available for all regardless of their location, prior knowledge or means,” said Dr. Toby Simpson, Director of the Library.
Simpson says the non-profit library is considered “a keystone resource for Holocaust research and education” and also happens to be the world’s oldest collection of original archival material on pre-war Jewish life, the Nazi era, and the Holocaust.
The free-to-access portal contains several new collections, such as documents of evidence from the Nuremberg war crimes trials, family papers of Jewish refugees, photographs of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and a unique compilation of 500 anti-Nazi propaganda pamphlets said to be ‘secretly’ distributed and shared among the population in Nazi Germany.
“These skilfully camouflaged pamphlets, disguised as advertisements for cosmetics or shampoo, recipe books, and even instruction manuals for housewives, offer a unique insight into the scale of anti-Nazi resistance in the Third Reich,” the library said.
Still filled with hundreds of thousands more pieces to digitize, the library expects the collection to continue to expand at a rate of about 100,000 documents, photographs, letters, unpublished works, etc., per year until its completion.
International Holocaust Memorial Day was established “to remember the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the millions of other victims of Nazi persecution,” according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which noted 2025 marks 80 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camps in occupied Poland in 1945.