Third Reich: personal accounts (microfilm)

This collection comprises two deposits whose relationship to each other is not known. The first consists of correspondence and reports concerning participants in two famous acts of protest during the Third Reich: the Rosenstrasse Protest in which the (mostly) Aryan partners of a specially segregated group of Jewish prisoners protested at their detention by the Nazis in a former welfare office for the Jewish community in Berlin, 1943; Das Sovjet-Paradies Aktion in which 500 Jews and Germans were arrested, half of whom were subsequently executed for sabotaging an exhibition by the Nazis designed to pour scorn and ridicule on the Soviet Union, 1942.

This first deposit came from Annelore Leber, the former wife of the pre-1933 SPD MP, Julius Leber, who was tortured and murdered by the Nazis in the aftermath of the plot to assassinate Hitler in July 1944. It was donated to the Wiener Library after a meeting between Annelore Leber and Alfred Wiener in Berlin in 1958. The material, which consists mainly of personal accounts of participants, was collated as a result of an advertisement put out in the Berliner Allgemeine Zeitung der Juden in Deutschland , 18 February 1955, asking for eye witness testimonies of these events.

The custodial history of the second deposit is unknown. It consists of transcripts of interrogations of former Nazi military and officials and interviews with anti-Nazi German citizens, by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) Morale Division, June-July 1945. The object of the questioning was to ascertain the morale of the population in the wake of sustained Allied bombing raids.

Annelore Leber; unknown