There is a story —possibly invented— about the British Intelligence Services in the 1920s. Apparently, they were in possession of a book called Mein Kampf (‘My Struggle’) that gathered dust on the shelves, unopened. After all, who had the time to read something by an unimportant Austrian lunatic called Adolf Hitler?
A CLEAR PICTURE
Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away in Germany, at least one man had a clearer understanding of the direction history was taking. Alfred Wiener was born into a Jewish family in Potsdam, north-west Germany, in 1885. He studied theology and the languages and cultures of the Middle East. Like everyone else of his generation, the course of his life was irrevocably altered by the First World War; he was conscripted into the army, fought for Germany, and was decorated with the Iron Cross, Second Class.
THE RISE OF THE NAZIS
After the war, Wiener returned to a country in political chaos. There, he correctly identified the faction that posed the greatest threat: the anti-Semitic extreme right. As early as 1919, Wiener wrote about the menace of the political movements that would evolve into Nazism. In 1925 the Nazis were generally seen as a fringe movement, a bunch of thugs and gangsters who were getting nowhere in elections. But that year Wiener published an essay on Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf, the very book that the British Secret Services were allegedly ignoring.
THE COLLECTOR
But what could one Jewish man do in the face of the rise of the Nazis? For Wiener, the answer was to write and warn and, above all, collect. Wiener collected political pamphlets, newspapers, testimonies, and objects of all kinds –anything that served as a record of his country’s descent into fascism. This was to become the core of a library now located in London.
HITLER IN POWER
By the early 1930s the Nazis were no longer on the fringe. In 1933 Hitler became Chancellor and the fascist takeover of Germany was complete. Wiener moved his family and library to Amsterdam (where, incidentally, his daughters befriended a young girl by the name of Anne Frank.) In the Netherlands he became a central figure in the foundation of the Jewish Central Information Office (JCIO), an organisation that continued his work of gathering material on the political situation in Europe.
NAZI AGGRESSION
In 1938, Germany annexed Austria and invaded Czechoslovakia. The danger was moving closer to Wiener and his family again. In 1939, fearing that the Netherlands would soon fall, he escaped with his archive to London, but was unable to get his family out in time; his wife, Margarethe, and his daughters Ruth, Eva and Mirjam, were captured by the Nazis. Wiener’s three daughters all survived the war and incarceration in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp but his wife, Margarethe, suffering from malnutrition and exhaustion, died in January 1945, before she could be reunited with her husband.
AN ESSENTIAL INSTITUTION
In London, Wiener’s work carried on in spite of personal tragedy and the war. From its new home, the library would go on to document the fate of Europe’s Jews. Today, the Wiener Holocaust Library is used by historians and scholars, and continues to add to its collections. It holds exhibitions on themes derived from its holdings. It is open to the public and everyone is welcome.
An Archive of the Holocaust
The Weiner Holocaust Library is the world’s oldest institution devoted to the study of the Holocaust, its causes and legacies. It is housed in a building in Russell Square, one of London’s prettiest garden squares. Close to University College London and the British Museum, it is a quiet area full of students and tourists. This somehow feels appropriate, despite the solemnity of the institution’s subject matter. Speak Up met with Dr. Barbara Warnock, Head of Education and Outreach at the Wiener Library. She began with examples of just how diverse the collection was:
Barbara Warnock (English accent): Very, very really. We’ve got a large collection of pamphlets. We’ve also got the world’s second largest collection of type of communist resistance material called Tarnschriften which were hidden little pamphlets concealed in things like tea packets, tomato seed packets [and] interior pages of magazines and distributed to networks in Germany, sent in from exiles abroad in the thirties. We have got Nazi documents, the Nuremberg War Crimes trial, a complete transcript. We’ve got the testimonies of the events of Kristallnacht. We’ve also got testimonies relating to the Holocaust from the 1950s, where library staff organised a large research project to gather testimonies to the Holocaust from across Europe.
JUSTICE AND HOPE
After the war, the archive provided materials to the United Nations War Crimes Commission for bringing war criminals to justice. Today, it is still used to track missing relatives, as Dr. Warnock explained.
Barbara Warnock: In the last few years we had one on refugees to Britain in the thirties and forties. We [also] had one on Nazi medical and scientific experimentation, we have Britain’s only copy of a digital archive called the International Tracing Service Archive. And it was a service that was trying to trace all the displaced, lost and missing people at the end of the Second World War. And it contains the records of 17 and a half million people. And it contains a huge wealth of information, including details about individuals, but also lots of Nazi documents, so transport lists, concentration camp lists, death camp records, lots of things that were used in order to try and work out what happened to people. And in fact we also have a researcher who can help families who are still approaching us every week to try and find out information about the lost and the missing and about family members. And, in fact, occasionally survivors still contact us to get information about themselves or their family story.