Some very bad and ugly news and some good news (ironically in the week), showing how different organizations tend to think when it comes to sharing vital information. US officials/Justice Department vs organizations, research institutions, libraries, archives, museums and memorial sites, from thirteen European countries.
THE BAD and THE UGLY
The following news is quite revealing. What an outrage.
Secret papers detail US aid for ex-Nazis
Washington: A secret history of the United States government's Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a "safe haven" in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad. ....
Read on
THE GOOD
This following info comes from a PDF on the NIOD website. NIOD (Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie) stands for the Dutch Institute for War Documentation, and this organization will coordinate the following interesting project:
EHRI: European Holocaust Research Infrastructure
This year the world commemorates the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. At the same time, a European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) project sets out to bring research into the Holocaust to a new level. EHRI’s main objective is to support the European Holocaust research community by giving them integrated online access to dispersed (archival) resources relating to the Holocaust all over Europe and Israel, and by encouraging collaborative research in multi-national research teams. To this end, twenty organizations, research institutions, libraries, archives, museums and memorial sites, from thirteen European countries will work together.
Truly European Research
According to the British historian Tony Judt the Second World War has finally become history in Europe. In order to keep remembering why it was judged so important to build a new Europe ‘out of the crematoria of Auschwitz’, Judt argues, we can only resort to history. The ‘vital link’ between Europe´s past and Europe´s present must be taught over and over again. To be able to teach Europe´s past, the historical research needs to become truly European and transcend national borders. But even now, it is still difficult to conduct truly international research into the Holocaust.
Fragmentation of sources
Holocaust studies rely more than most other fields of research on a huge variety of archives. Holocaust archives are fragmented and scattered all over the world, making access complicated, if not impossible, and very time-consuming. The fragmentation of sources does not only result from the fact that the Holocaust was not restricted to one place or country, but also from the Nazi attempts to destroy the evidence, and the migration after the Second World War of Holocaust survivors. After the war many different projects have been set up to document what happened. In recent decades even more specific collections have been established, especially in regional centres. Eastern European archives have opened up. Unfortunately there is no uniformity in cataloguing and describing. Many different languages are used in the original documents as well as in the cataloguing systems, necessitating translation and making comparison difficult. Finally, one of the major challenges for every scholar of the Holocaust is to avoid the domination of the perpetrators’ sources over the voices of persecuted Jews. The documents of Jews and their organizations often followed the fate of their owners: they were in many cases destroyed or dispersed.
Collaboration and integration
Although many organizations throughout Europe and Israel have already done excellent work in collecting and saving documents, objects, photo’s, film and art related to the Holocaust, it is now possible to bring all these sources together and take the research into this area further. To this end, EHRI will design and implement a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) offering online access to a wide variety of dispersed Holocaust archives and to a number of tools to work with them. Building on integration programmes undertaken over the past decades by the twenty partners in the consortium and a large network of associate partners, EHRI sets out to transform the data available for Holocaust research around Europe and elsewhere into a cohesive body of resources. An important condition for making EHRI a success, is an interdisciplinary structure. The scholars involved in EHRI are not only trained historians and political and social scientists but also archivists and digital research infrastructure specialists. The collaboration between historians, archivists and ICT specialists is crucial to EHRI's ambition.
The general public
Although EHRI is primarily geared to the needs of scholarly communities, the online availability and open access to reliable Holocaust material set in the proper context, is relevant to and important for the general public as well. A European approach is essential to achieve a better understanding of the Holocaust as a European phenomenon, so that the vital link between Europe’s past and present can be taught over and over again.
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From a PDF-
factsheet:
EHRI-facts
About the Holocaust:
- The Holocaust is probably the most important event in Twentieth Century European History.
- The Holocaust was an era of chaos, destruction and death. Across Europe the Third Reich annihilated millions and ravaged the lives of many more people. Millions of Jews were murdered and many others were displaced. They fought, fled, were deported and incarcerated. Families were torn apart, whole areas became depopulated.
- But in spite of the Nazi’s relentless effort to report and document the Holocaust, we have not yet grasped the extent of disruption it caused. Not only people, but also their belongings and personal documents went missing or got scattered all over the world.
- In Eastern Europe Holocaust awareness is lagging behind, while Eastern Europe was a prime place of crime.
About Holocaust research:
- Every day thousands of researchers - scholars and amateurs - seek to secure the collective memory of the Holocaust.
- Holocaust documentation is often digitized but not organized.
- Holocaust studies rely more than most other fields of research on a huge variety of archives. These archives are fragmented and dispersed, making access complicated, if not impossible.
About EHRI:
- EHRI is about access to archives and connecting collections.
- EHRI’s infrastructure will be ‘the cloud’ for Holocaust research, its users are ‘the crowd’.
- EHRI will democratize Holocaust research: getting the public engaged is getting research results!
- EHRI wants to give the entire Holocaust a face, by making local history available all over Europe.
- EHRI shows people how to find their way in Holocaust collections, it is not another digital library!
- Special attention will be paid to education and outreach by stimulating open access to Holocaust material for the public. As such, the project will make an essential contribution to the ability of (non-governmental) organizations, teachers and individual citizens to make new generations aware of what happened.
- EHRI will give access to the dispersed archives. EHRI develops online tools to integrate data and information. In this way, EHRI will attain unprecedented levels of collaborative research in the humanities and digital history. EHRI will develop and test new methodologies, address new research topics, and reach new, more precise conclusions, covering significantly more historical data and locations.
- The EHRI-project will also stimulate and facilitate research into relatively unknown aspects of the Holocaust. This entails special attention to Eastern Europe, since the vast majority of Holocaust victims lived in Eastern Europe.
- The EHRI consortium consists of 20 partners from Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and the United Kingdom.
- EU Financial contribution: € 7 million
- Funding scheme (FP7): Combination of Collaborative Projects and Coordination and Support Actions (CP-CSA) - Duration: 48 months.
- Coordinator: NIOD. Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam, Dr. Conny Kristel.
About the Launch of EHRI:
The launch of EHRI, November 16 in Brussels, is an official event on the agenda of the Belgium Presidency. European Council President Herman Van Rompuy gave his ‘patronage’ to the start of EHRI. Mrs. Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, will make an opening statement. Holocaust survivors and researchers will elaborate on the importance of continuing Holocaust research. Also Mr. Gideon Saar, Minister of Education of Israel and Mr. Halbe Zijlstra, State Secretary of Education, Culture and Science of The Netherlands, will speak on the importance of international Holocaust research.
The EHRI consortium
- NIOD-KNAW. Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Netherlands, coordinator)
- CEGES-SOMA (Belgium)
- Zidovske Muzeum v Praze (Czech Republic)
- Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Germany)
- Yad Vashem. The Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority (Israel)
- The Wiener Library Institute of Contemporary History (UK)
- Holocaust Dokumentacios Kozpont Es Emlekgyujtemeny Kozalapitvany (Hungary)
- Senter for studier av Holocaust og livssynsminoriteter (Norway)
- Kansallisarkisto (Finland)
- Zydowski Instytut Historyczny Im. Emanuela Ringelbluma (Poland)
- King’s College London (UK)
- Georg August Universitaet Goettingen Stiftung Oeffentlichen Rechts (Germany)
- Athena Research and Innovation Center in Information Communication & Knowledge Technologies (Greece)
- DANS-KNAW. Data Archiving and Networked Services (Netherlands)
- Memorial de la Shoah (France)
- Internationaler Suchdienst (Germany)
- Stiftung Denkmal für die Ermordeten Juden Europas (Germany)
- Památnik Terezin (Czech Republic) Beit Theresienstadt (Israel)
- Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust Studien (Austria)
Thing is, there is always something about Hitler in some museum, so I might have simply not noticed. I mean, there's even mention of Hitler in the exhibition I'm currently taking part in, and that's about medieval Persia!
