Research Sources & Other Useful Appendices

Vera Laska notes that there are over ten-thousand printed sources relating to Auschwitz alone, and offers this guidance for those pursuing Holocaust research:

• Yad Vashem Martyrs' and Heroes' Memorial Authority in Jerusalem is a depository of documents and memoirs on the Holocaust, mostly in German, Hebrew and Yiddish. It also issues the Yad Vashem Studies on the European Jewish Catastrophe and Resistance. (The 1991 Yad Vashem English publications guide is now included in the Holocaust Almanac bibliographies. See holocaust biblio.05)

• The Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris and the Wiener Library in London are major sources of information. The Wiener Library's catalogue series published a bibliography, Persecution and Resistance Under the Nazis (London: Valentine, Mitchell, 1960). ...

• In the United States the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (1048 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10028) houses several collections of ghetto documents and related primary source materials. It publishes the YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science. Since 1960, Yad Vashem and the YIVO Institute have been engaged in preparing a multivolume bibliographical series on the Holocaust; one of the volumes, Jacob Robinson, ed., The Holocaust and After: Sources and Literature in English (Jerusalem: Israel University Press, 1973) is most helpful.

• The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (823 United Nations Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10017) supplies teaching materials at reasonable prices, for instance The Record - The Holocaust in History, 1933-1945, published in cooperation with the National Council for Social Studies in 1978.

• The Library of Congress and the National Archives are rich sources for researchers, containing among others the transcripts of war crime trials. This in itself is an immense documentation; for instance, the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial of twenty-three defendents alone takes up 11,538 pages in nineteen volumes. Indexes can be consulted about various concentration camps. ...