Archive Project at the Simon Wiesenthal Archive (SWA): Digitisation of the Image Carriers of Simon Wiesenthal’s Nazi Case Files

The core of Simon Wiesenthal's documentation activities are the case files on Nazi perpetrators and Nazi crime complexes, which were compiled by Wiesenthal and his colleagues at the BJVN Documentation Centre until 2005. There is a small collection (VWI-SWA,I.4) "Fotos von NS-Täterinnen und -Tätern, NS-Verbrechenskomplexen, Lagern, Lagerhäftlingen und KZ-Gedenkstätten" (engl.: "Photos of Nazi perpetrators, Nazi crime complexes, camps, camp prisoners and concentration camp memorials") containing these case files. These almost 750 photos, (glass) negatives, postcards and stickers were collected from 1945 to 2005 and are partly in a fragile condition. In addition to SS members and Nazi perpetrators, they also show victims of Nazi crimes as well as concentration camps and memorials. Hence these images make a fundamental contribution to the visualisation of the crimes documented in the case files, including the perpetrators and victims.

In order to make this collection usable for research, education and culture, the collection will be digitised and archivally processed in this project - financed by the Federal Ministry of Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport, Section IV Arts and Culture. For this purpose, the photos will be scanned, assigned to the case files, recorded in the archive information system and will be searchable using keywords.

Archival Project on the Simon Wiesenthal Archive (SWA):
Early Wiesenthal – The Linz Papers, 1945–1961

Unlike often assumed, Simon Wiesenthal did not donate all of the files from his first documentation centre – the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre in Linz – to the Yad Vashem Archive in 1956. Aside from his files on Adolf Eichmann, he retained numerous other documents, which he took to Vienna in 1961, where he reopened his office in the autumn. Other materials he reassembled over time.

The Linz materials mirror the entire range of Wiesenthal’s early activity. This included not only the documentation of Nazi crimes, research on the perpetrators, and the search for and intermediation on behalf of witnesses, but also those activities that remain less known to this day, such as supporting survivors after the Holocaust in various matters as well as various memorial initiatives. This heterogeneous material encompasses correspondence, manuscripts, witness testimonies, newspaper clippings, and documents from the Nazi period, as well as photographs, sketches, and maps, through to personal and biographical documents relating to Wiesenthal.

This project conceptualised by the VWI Archive aims to localise and identify the materials from Wiesenthal’s Linz period, which are currently scattered across several collections and series within the SWA, to catalogue and digitise these materials, and thereby to make them visible again and – at least digitally – to reunite them. The results of the project will then be made available online via the archive catalogue.

This project on “Early Wiesenthal” will thereby make a contribution to the provenance of the SWA and lay the foundations for historical research on Wiesenthal’s early search for Nazi perpetrators immediately after 1945 as well as on Displaced Persons and the early engagements with Nazi crimes and their aftermath inside and outside Austria.

Wiesenthal in Linz. A virtual exhibition

In appreciation to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) for supporting this archival project.

Simon Wiesenthal Archive (SWA)

Encompassing some 200 linear metres of materials focussing primarily on the period between 1945 and 2005, the Simon Wiesenthal Archive (SWA) is the most expansive collection of the Archive of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI). It comprises primarily textual records, but also books and brochures, indices, a photo and object collection, as well as audio-visual media and posters.

Simon Wiesenthal began his search for Nazi perpetrators in Linz in the early summer of 1945 immediately following his liberation from the Mauthausen concentration camp. The first years of his search were closely tied to providing help and support to the survivors of the Holocaust. Wiesenthal used the temporary presence of the survivors, thousands of whom were waiting in collection camps for a chance to emigrate, to systematically question them as witnesses of the crimes and injustices they had suffered: Hundreds of witnesses were thereby recruited to testify at American and later also Austrian trials.

Due to the mass emigration of survivors that began in 1948, this chapter was only of short duration, yet it laid the foundations for Wiesenthal’s lifelong activities that followed. In 1956, he donated the bulk of the materials that had been compiled in Linz to the archive of Yad Vashem, where it remains to this day. The majority of this material is now available online under Record Group M.9. Wiesenthal kept the rest of the material and took it with him to Vienna. With the establishment of the Documentation Centre of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime (BJVN), Wiesenthal opened a new office in Vienna in the autumn of 1961 and resumed the work he had begun in Linz. He collected a large number of documents relating to Nazi perpetrators and Nazi crimes that are today accessible in 8,000 folders, among other formats.

Wiesenthal’s life and work were shaped above all by the societal engagement with the Nazi past as well as his corresponding commitment that this past should not be forgotten. Before he passed away, Wiesenthal expressed his wish to integrate the collected materials into the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI), which was still just at the planning stage at the time. The VWI is now systematically cataloguing these materials, collating them in a database, digitising them, and making them available both for research as well as to the broader public.

Current Archival Projects in the Simon Wiesenthal Archive (SWA):

Early Wiesenthal – The Linz Papers, 1945-1961
Digitisation of the Image Carriers of Simon Wiesenthal’s Nazi Case Files

Using the Archive / Contact Information

Effective from January 2020