Jewish Studies: Holocaust Studies

Overview

Stanford Libraries actively collects work on the Holocaust for use in teaching and research in a wide variety of formats - from books and scholarly journals to primary, archival documents, and collections of Holocaust testimonies. This section is meant to help our patrons begin their research into this topic, and to find important sources here at Stanford Libraries.

A large percentage of books and materials that Stanford Libraries collects on the Holocaust is supported by The Henry and Regina Bandet Fund for Jewish History and Culture. Established in memory of the donors parents, the fund enables us to provide Stanford researchers with the materials necessary to conduct their scholarship, and also to safeguard important documents and records. Stanford's catalog enables users to search by bookplate fund, and this link can also be used to discover new arrivals and newly published materials.

Testimonies and Original Sources

Taube Archive of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, 1945-46
The collection in the Virtual Tribunal platform contains approximately 250,000 pages of digitized paper documents (transcripts of the hearings in English, French, German and Russian; written pleadings; evidence exhibits filed by the prosecution and the defense; documents of the Committee for the Investigation and Prosecution of Major War Criminals; the judgment). The official archives of the International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg (the “Nuremberg Trial Archives”) were entrusted to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 1950. The ICJ and its Registry are the custodians of the entire archive, which includes the original print documents that are available in digital form here, audio recordings of the trial's proceedings, and evidentiary films.
Fortunoff video archive for Holocaust testimonies
The Fortunoff Archive currently holds more than 4,400 testimonies, which are comprised of over 12,000 recorded hours of videotape. Testimonies were produced in cooperation with thirty-six affiliated projects across North America, South America, Europe, and Israel, and each project maintains a duplicate collection of locally recorded videotapes. The Fortunoff Archive and its affiliates recorded the testimonies of willing individuals with first-hand experience of the Nazi persecutions, including those who were in hiding, survivors, bystanders, resistants, and liberators. Testimonies were recorded in whatever language the witness preferred, and range in length from 30 minutes to over 40 hours (recorded over several sessions)

Visual history archive
Contains nearly 52,000 video testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust taped in 56 countries and in 32 languages between 1994 and 1999. Most testimonies have been indexed for keywords at one-minute segments.

Archival Collections at Stanford

In recent years, Stanford has begun to collect original archival materials and records documenting the Holocaust. Below you will find some examples of collections that can aid in teaching and research.

Reutlinger Holocaust archive, 1929-1950s
An archive of letters and documents of Louis Reutlinger who was imprisoned along with his family in two French concentration camps - Camp de Gurs and Camp de Rivesaltes for 10 months in 1940-1941. In the camps he worked with Jewish youth, and was active in the attempts to improve the imprisonment and feeding condition of the inmates, and had a few successes. He also attempted to obtain immigration visas to the Rivesaltes Jewish inmates, and for that made detailed lists of the Jewish inmates who were candidates for immigration.
Jewish printer’s papers, circa 1930s-1950s
Correspondence, documents, and photographs from the files of Jewish printer Ira Kafenstock. Kafenstock was born in Breslau in 1914, spent April 1940 until May 1943 in the Warsaw Ghetto, and worked as a printer after the war in DP camps in Germany.
Aryanization of M. Elsbach & Co. in Coburg : correspondence and documents, 1938-1944
This collection concerns the attempted "Aryanization" of the M. Elsbach & Co. furniture store in Coburg, Germany. Contains correspondence, financial documents, certificates and an M. Elsbach & Co. photo illustrated catalog. The materials deal with the attempted sale and purchase of the M. Elsbach & Co. firm, of Coburg, to comply with the Aryanization laws of Nazi Germany
Appraisals of Jewish-owned houses in occupied France, 1942-1944
A large collection of detailed appraisals, accompanied by architectural drawings, letters and documents, made by French architect Pierre Hennequin for the purpose of expropriating Jewish property within the framework of the Aryanization process. The documents are divided into ten numbered files, each dedicated to the property of a different Jewish family, documenting its expropriation
Edith Anna Strauss papers, 1921-1942
This collection consists of correspondence, official documents, printed materials, schoolwork, ephemera, album amicorums, and other materials documenting the life of a young German Jew from the 1920s to the early 1940s. The correspondence between Edith Strauss and her parents includes correspondence between Strauss in New York and her parents who were still in Germany.
Bernard Zakheim Papers
Born in Poland in 1898, artist Bernard Zakheim emigrated to San Francisco in 1920. Zakheim was best known for the murals he painted in Coit Tower and in Toland Hall at the University of California, San Francisco, He died in San Francisco in 1985. In the late 1930s and early 1940s some of the correspondence deals with Zakheim's effort to get family members out of Europe and to locate missing relatives. The search for the missing continues after the end of the Second World War, and the Holocaust became a major subject for Zakheim's artistic output following the war.
Volk woher - Volk wohin : Erbbiologie im Lichte des Judentums
Alfred Heinemann was a Jewish-German doctor in Saarlouis, Germany. In 1938 he emigrated from Germany to Dunkirk, New York. This collection consists of Alfred Heinemann's 280 leaves holograph manuscript on Jewish genetics. The manuscript is in German and there are gaps in the pagination. There are also a number research materials: newspaper clippings, periodicals, pamphlets, and ephemera. Included in the periodicals are Israelitisches familienblatt, der Israelit, and Jüdische bibliothek.
World War One-era diary of a German Jew, Siegfried Mai
This fascinating war journal and memoir of the young German Jew Siegfried Mai (1898-1980) who stemmed from Hagenbach, Rhineland-Palatinate (close to Karlsruhe), details the trials and tribulations of the war and its after-effects in a personal account.

After the war, Siegfried Mai reflects here on the betrayal of Jewish soldiers: "I fought with all my youthful strength, I fought with joy for freedom and equality in a beautiful Germany, which I believed in, as did so many of my co-religionists. A Germany that would fulfill what was promised by the German Emperor at the beginning of the war: ‘The gratitude of the Fatherland is assured you.’ For us German Jews it turned out differently. The blood of 12,000 Jewish soldiers was shed in vain. In 1919, a great anti-Semitic agitation began, which has increased from year to year…"

The diary ends shortly after Kristallnacht, 1938. Siegfried (soon to be known as Fred) was able to flee to America where he built a new life with his wife and children in the German-Jewish émigré haven of Washington Heights, New York.
Klaus J. Herrmann correspondence, 1960-1990
Klaus J. Herrmann was born July 21, 1929 in Pomerania (which was then part of Germany). The Herrmann family moved to Berlin until August, 1940, when increasing Nazi persecution of Jews forced the family to travel to Shanghai, China where they stayed for the duration of World War II. The collection consists mostly of correspondence, including correspondence Herrmann conducted with the families of ex-Nazi officials. The collection also contains research Herrmann compiled on Nazis and far-right parties in post-World War II Germany.