When war was declared between Germany and the United Kingdom, September 3, 1939, all Germans and Austrians living in the UK were automatically classified as ‘enemy aliens’.1 For the first time in the historiography of this subject, this article maps where Germans and Austrians over the age of 16 were resident in the United Kingdom Read More
Category: Holocaust Geographies
An Excruciating Month: A History and Topography of the Pest Ghetto
“After Ilonka and I were shown to an apartment in a building, we stayed inside with one group of children, huddling because of the cold. […] I was aware of the scary situation we were in, but unlike Ilonka, I did not feel scared. In fact, I did not feel much of anything at all, Read More
Tracing the Dislocation of a Sinti Family in a Genocidal Context: the R165 Collection of the German Federal Archives
In September 1981, in the basement of the Tübingen University, German survivors of the Sinti and Roma genocide and remembrance activists captured the racial archives created by the scientific authorities under the Nazi regime to identify, deport and destroy their families.1 The documents seized were immediately given to the German Federal Archives. Today, this vast Read More
Mapping the Archive: The Wiener Holocaust Library’s Refugee Map
‘Place is not only a fact to be explained in the broader frame of space, but it is also a reality to be clarified and understood from the perspectives of the people who have given it meaning.’1 Introduction The Wiener Holocaust Library is the UK’s largest archive of personal papers related to Jewish refugees from Read More
Left Behind – A Project Opening up Little-Known Holocaust Histories as well as New Tools
Almost half of the Jewish population of Belgium was murdered during the Holocaust. Complete families were wiped out, creating blind spots in the information available to reconstruct their stories in particular, but also certain aspects of the Belgian case in general. Personal documents of survivors and non-survivors thus become even more important to fill these Read More
