Copy eyewitness reports regarding the November Pogrom
Extent and Medium
1 folder
Archival History
Today The Wiener Library speculates that the full collection of November Pogrom reports, including these apparent duplicates, were sourced using the JCIO's several usual modes of information gathering, including face to face interviews, telephone conversations, letters and written reports, selecting and cropping newspaper articles, and obtaining informal intelligence via conversations and correspondence with other organisations and contacts. Some time after the Library had been moved to London in 1939, the bundle of 356 documents was bound into a single volume between red leather boards, probably in the 1960s. In 1998 (the 60th anniversary of the November Pogrom) the main reports were microfilmed for inclusion in Testaments to the Holocaust, a microfilm document collection published in that year. Around that time the damaged red leather binding holding the reports together was removed. Over time this binding had become increasingly frail and started to disintegrate. The 636 sheets were rebound in two large-format folio volumes fitted into a slip case. A decade later, for the 70th anniversary in 2008, the microfilm reels were digitised and re-published by Cengage together with other content as an online database for subscribers. Also in 2008 the Library published the 356 reports in German as a hardback book entitled Novemberpogrom 1938 - Die Augenzeugenberichte der Wiener Library. In 2015, the Library published English translations of the reports in a book entitled Pogrom - November 1938: Testimonies from ‘Kristallnacht’ and as a companion website with the same name.
Scope and Content
These copy reports are apparently strays from a full collection of 356 reports (WL Document Collection 1375) gathered in the weeks and months following the November Pogrom of 1938 by the Jewish Central Information Office (JCIO) in Amsterdam. They bear a similar reference number to the rest of the reports in this collection, pre-fixed by the letter 'B'. These reports have been numbered separately (B.104, B.131, B.240) and are in relation to the destruction of synagogues in Germany during the November Pogrom.
Conditions Governing Access
Open
Subjects
- Antisemitism
- Synagogues
- Kristallnacht, 1938
- Personal narratives