‘Nuovo modo di testimoniare’: uno dei più grandi archivi sull’Olocausto è online | Olocausto

One of the world’s largest Holocaust archives is accessible online for the first time after a three-year digitisation of much of the collection.

Announced on Holocaust Memorial Day, the Wiener Holocaust Library’s new online platform includes more than 150,000 items collected over nine decades. Users can view letters, pamphlets and photographs that record the rise of fascism in Britain and Europe.

The director of the library, Dr Toby Simpson, said the project had been in the works for more than 10 years and he hoped it would help it find a new audience of scholars and become a “new way of bearing witness in the digital age”.

Some of the most fascinating items are Tarnschriften or “hidden writings” – anti-fascist propaganda hidden in everyday items including powder shampoo and tea leaves.

Concealed in luggage and smuggled across borders into Germany, the writing was one of the few ways for Germans to become aware of the Nazis’ activities.

“They’re camouflaged anti-Nazi pamphlets,” said Simpson. “They wanted to get the message into Germany, it was impossible for people to get that literature from any other source. If anyone was caught with anti-Nazi material they could be beaten up or arrested by the Gestapo.”

He added: “The disguises were incredibly elaborate, one included instructions for how to take care of your cactus. The hope was that if your luggage was searched on the train they would hopefully just pass over it and not realise what you were carrying.”

Each year the library receives about 50 collections, which can range from a few letters donated by individuals to entire archives, such as the dozens of boxes of material it received from the Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad, an organisation that helped displaced people.

The digitisation process has given the museum a chance to review material it has long held, uncovering stories that have laid in the archive perhaps untouched for decades.

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