A.C. Buehler Library: Holocaust Resources: Resources on the Holocaust

Primary Sources on the Holocaust

Archives Unbound: Holocaust Studies This link opens in a new window
A collection of historical digitized materials to support research in a specific topic area. The Holocaust Studies collection includes primary source materials covering topics such as: correspondence from German concentration camps and prisons, German anti-Semitic propaganda, Jewish emigration, Nazi finances, Nazi looting, Nazi war crimes, U.S. relations with the Vatican and the Holocaust, and Jewish underground resistance.

Holocaust Journals

Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Holocaust and Genocide Studies is the premier forum for work on the extensive body of literature and documentation on the Holocaust and genocide. It features essays and reviews that cut across the disciplines of history, literature, economics, religious studies, anthropology, political science, sociology, and others. HGS is the only publication to address the related study of how insights into the Holocaust apply to other genocides. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Videos on the Holocaust

Academic Video Online: Premium (AVON) This link opens in a new window
Academic Video Online (AVON) delivers more than 70,000 video titles spanning the widest range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film and more. AVON includes every kind of video material available with curricular relevance: documentaries, interviews, performances, news programs and newsreels, field recordings, commercials, and raw footage. Users will find thousands of award-winning films, including Academy®, Emmy®, and Peabody® winners as well as the most frequently used films for classroom instruction, plus newly released films and previously unavailable archival material.
Films on Demand: Master Academic Package This link opens in a new window
A collection of over 35,000 academic videos from a variety of producers, including A&E, PBS, BBC Learning, National Geographic, ABC News, NBC News, CNBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, HBO Documentary Films, PBS NewsHour, Open University, Bill Moyers, California Newsreel, Annenberg Learner, TED, Films for the Humanities & Sciences, and more.

Paper Clips and the Children's Holocaust Memorial

One Clip at a Time - The Paper Clips Project
A Holocaust education class designed to teach tolerance to middle schoolers in a small town in Tennessee grew into a movement that culminated with the dedication of the Children's Holocaust Memorial, and a moving documentary about the project called Paper Clips.

Institutions and Organizations that Study the Holocaust

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)
Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center
Yad Vashem
the world Holocaust remembrance center
The Anne Frank House
Holocaust Museum LA
The Wiener Holocaust Library
The Wiener Holocaust Library is one of the world’s leading and most extensive archives on the Holocaust, the Nazi era and genocide. The Library’s unique collection of over one million items includes published and unpublished works, press cuttings, photographs and eyewitness testimony.
Holocaust Museum Houston
See their research starter guides on a variety of Holocaust and genocide topics.

The USC Shoah Foundation

About the Institute

USC Shoah Foundation develops empathy, understanding and respect through testimony. By recording and preserving audiovisual testimonies of eyewitnesses to genocide and crimes against humanity, we give voice to survivors and share their life histories and experiences with the world. While the witnesses guide us through the darkness of humanity, they also shed light on the possibilities for every individual to counter hatred. We are inspired by their hard-fought hope. We believe testimony has a positive influence on people to be more kind, empathetic and humanistic. We listen deeply, consider carefully, and place testimony in context.

Through academic programs and research at our Center for Advanced Genocide Research, we build knowledge and insight. Our education programs deliver practical digital tools and resources via our award-winning website IWitness for our partners and their audiences from primary through university-level instruction. We evaluate our work.

The Institute’s efforts are rooted in the Visual History Archive, a repository containing 55,000 testimonies of survivors and witnesses to genocide and crimes against humanity. The vast majority of the documented experiences are about the Holocaust. The Archive also includes hundreds of eyewitness testimonies of genocides in Armenia, Cambodia, Central African Republic, Guatemala, and Rwanda, the Nanjing Massacre, and most recently anti-Rohingya violence in Myanmar and current antisemitic violence in Europe and the United States.

Conducted in 63 countries, the testimonies average a little more than two hours each in length. The Archive contains more than 115,000 hours of testimony — the equivalent of 13 years. Its powerful search engine enables users to key in on specific moments of interest.

The Institute has also pioneered how history can be preserved and experienced in the digital age, inventing an interactive biography project called Dimensions in Testimony. The project enables people to have question-and-response sessions with pre-recorded video testimonies of genocide survivors. Dimensions in Testimony offers a way to preserve the ability to have real-time conversations with witnesses to history. To date, 19 testimonies have been recorded in this manner. The Institute also has produced several award winning documentary films, including two filmed in 360-degree virtual reality.

Ultimately, our work centers around a worldwide effort to bring testimony to light, to preserve the faces and voices of the people who witnessed history, allowing their firsthand stories to inspire action to build a more positive world for generations to come.

USC Shoah Foundation

Visual History Collection Online

You can search the Visual History Archive Online to view one of the more than 3,000 interviews available in the online repository VHA Online

The complete archive of more than 55,000 interviews is available in our area at Northwestern University. Information about access for the general public in in this LibGuide Guide to using the Visual History Archive from the Shoah Foundation Institute at the Northwestern University Library.

More information about the USC Shoah Foundation is available through this USC LibGuide USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive: Introduction