The Wiener Library Institute of Contemporary History

descrição da organização

The Wiener Library is the world's oldest Holocaust memorial institution, tracing its history back to 1933. Alfred Wiener, a German Jew who worked in the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, fled Germany in 1933 for Amsterdam. Together with Prof. David Cohen, he set up the Jewish Central Information Office, collecting and disseminating information about events happening in Nazi Germany. The collection was moved to London in 1939 and it settled at its present address in 2011. It contains over 60 000 books, 10 000 photographs and thousands of documents. Today the Library continues from strength to strength, acquiring major collections, holding regular lectures and events, providing a focal point for researchers and students both young and old.

The Wiener Library collects material related to the Holocaust, its causes and legacies.
It attempts to collect comprehensively in the following areas:
• Historiography and documentation of the Holocaust
• Jewish refugees and exiles in Great Britain, Kindertransport
• Resistance against the racial persecution of Jews by Nazis and collaborators

At a more selective level, the Library collects material in the following areas:
• Modern Central European Jewish history
• The rise and fall of Nazi Germany
• War crimes and war crimes trials
• Remembrance, and confronting the Nazi past
• Revisionist and Holocaust denial literature
• Antisemitism
• Comparative Genocide studies

The Library has holdings of approximately 65,000 items searchable online. It is a multi-language collection with most items in German and English. Parts of the collections are on microfilm. Up to one third of the collection contains pre-war material, and we continue actively to add to the collection and search for rare material from all over the world.

The Wiener Library is based in Russell Square, in the heart of Bloombsury. We are situated in proximity of all major London universities such as University College London, SOAS, Birkbeck, London School of Economics, etc... Our visitors and readers are mainly students, academics and researchers from the UK, other European countries and the US. Additionally we engage significantly with the London Jewish community whose members use the library for family research and take part in numerous events.
Through a variety of exhibitions we reach out to other communities and groups: to mention one example we hosted two exhibitions focusing on the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984 in Delhi and on the situation of the Rwandan population after the genocide in 1994.

There are 18 staff and approximately 35 volunteers on the central London site, who work in the following key areas:
• The Library, which is open to the public and is generally used by researchers, professors and students, as well as by people who want to find out about their family history.
• The Educational Department, which organises exhibitions, lectures, conferences and other publicity work.