The Wiener Holocaust Library was founded in Amsterdam, Netherlands, in 1934 under the name Jewish Central Information Office. Its founder was German Jewish exile Dr Alfred Wiener (1885–1965), an anti-Nazi campaigner. In the context of deteriorating prospects for peace in Europe and for Jews in Germany, the organisation relocated to London, United Kingdom, in summer 1939.
Since the 1930s, the Library has gathered documents, photographs and books on the Nazi era, the Holocaust, Jewish refugees who came to Britain and other materials related to these topics, and it is todayone of the world’s leading and most extensive archives on the Holocaust and the Nazi era.
Eyewitness Accounts
The Wiener Holocaust Library holds a number of important accounts relating to the persecution of Roma and Sinti. Particularly noteworthy is Collection 1656: Eyewitness Accounts. This collection was formed after the Library’s Head of Research, Dr Eva Reichmann (1897–1998), launched an effort to gather eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust from across Europe, beginning in the mid 1950s.1Cf. Joskowicz, Rain of Ash, 155f. Ultimately, over a thousand accounts were collected, including a very small number given by Roma and Sinti survivors.2The exact number is currently being determined. The catalogue descriptions of 29 of the accounts refer to Sinti and Roma, but it remains to be confirmed whether these are accounts by Sinti and Roma themselves or by other eyewitnesses to the persecution of Sinti and Roma. The accounts by Roma and Sinti survivors in Collection 1656 were gathered in Vienna by the Library’s researcher Emmi Moravitz, after Reichmann specifically asked her to try to interview Roma and Sinti survivors.
An important item in the collection is the detailed testimony which Austrian Sinti survivor Hermine Horvath (1925–1958) provided in 1958 (Ref. No 1656/3/8/795), documenting her experiences from the time of the German takeover of Austria in 1938 until the end of the war. Unusually for an account given by a woman at this time, Horvath was explicit about the sexual abuse committed by the SS [Schutzstaffel] that she experienced and witnessed. The collection also holds a number of accounts by non-Romani witnesses to the persecution of Roma and Sinti. Many of the Library’s eyewitness accounts, including Horvath’s, have now been translated into English and are available to view on the website www.testifyingtothetruth.co.uk.
The ‘Kenrick Collection’
In 1968, The Wiener Library and Institute for Contemporary History (as the Library was then called) part-funded a project by researchers Donald Kenrick (1929–2015) and Grattan Puxon (born 1940) to investigate and document the Nazi genocide against the Roma and Sinti. Puxon, who was the Secretary of the Gypsy Council in the UK, had been asked by Jacques Dauvergne (aka Vanko Rouda) (1936–unknown), Secretary of Comité International Tsigane [now known as Comité International Rom], to collect material that might help Roma and Sinti in claims for compensation for persecution committed by the Nazi regime. Kenrick later deposited some of the material gathered with the Library (Collection 611), including an unpublished volume, Gypsies Under the Nazis, which was revised and published in 1972 as The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies. The collection, ‘Material Relating to the Persecution of the Gypsies under Nazis’, often referred to as ‘the Kenrick Collection’, also contains a number of personal accounts of the experiences of Romani survivors of the genocide (in 611/1), copies of testimonies given to other researchers (611/12), and a report on the so-called ‘Gypsy camp’ in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp by Hermann Langbein (1912–1995). Other material in Collection 611 includes notes on various topics, such as the persecution of Roma and Sinti in Belgium and the Netherlands.3See an overview of Collection 611 in https://wiener.soutron.net/Portal/Default/en-GB/RecordView/Index/70561. Readers need to book a reading room terminal to access this digital content.
Other Holdings
Other documents of relevance to the topic in the Library’s collections include a small number of copies of perpetrator photographs of Roma in Nazi camps (Collection 1 / Blue Album Collection), and references to the persecution and genocide of Roma and Sinti can be found in the documents entered in evidence at the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials: the Library holds a set of copies of these (Collection 1655).
In recent years, the Library’s collections of material relevant to the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Roma and Sinti have been augmented by the possession of Britain’s only copy of the International Tracing Service / Arolsen Archives. This digital collection contains a wealth of material tracing the fates of individual Roma and Sinti survivors, post-war compensation claims and campaigns, and Nazi policies against Roma and Sinti.
