Alfred Wiener, a German Jew who worked for the
Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith), a Jewish civil rights group, spent years documenting the rise of
antisemitism. He collected books, photographs, letters, magazines and other materials, including school primers and children's games, recording the spread of Nazi propaganda and its racist doctrines. In 1933, Wiener fled Germany for
Amsterdam, where he operated the Jewish Central Information Office (JCIO).
Dr. David Cohen became its president. Cohen was a prominent Dutch Jew who founded the
Committee for Jewish Refugees at the same time; the Committee used the work of the JCIO for its publications, and provided some financial support to the JCIO. After
Kristallnacht in November 1938, Wiener and the JCIO archives were relocated in Britain. Wiener's wife Margarethe (née Saulmann) and three daughters Ruth, Eva, and
Mirjam remained in the Netherlands and on 20 June 1943 were detained by the Nazis and sent to
Westerbork transit camp. In January 1944, after seven months in Westerbork, the family were deported to
Bergen-Belsen. In January 1945, a rare opportunity to be part of a prisoner scheme between the Nazis and the United States appeared. The Wieners were chosen for this exchange and transported to Switzerland. Shortly afterward, Margarethe became too ill to continue travelling. On 25 January 1945, she was taken into a Swiss hospital and died just a few hours later. Soon after, Ruth, Eva, and Mirjam boarded a
Red Cross ship, the
Gripsholm, bound for New York where they were reunited with their father. The collection opened in London on 1 September 1939, the day of the Nazi invasion of Poland. Following the end of World War II, the library used its extensive collections on
National Socialism and the
Third Reich to provide material to the
United Nations War Crimes Commission for bringing war criminals to justice. Increasingly the collection was referred to as ‘Dr Wiener's Library' and eventually this led to its renaming. The Library published a bi-monthly bulletin commencing in November 1946 (and which continued until 1983) drew heavily on the library's own source material. Another important task during the 1950s and 1960s was the gathering of eyewitness accounts, a resource that was to become a unique and important part of the Library's collection. The accounts were collected systematically by a team of interviewers. In 1964, the
Institute of Contemporary History was established and took up the neglected field of modern European history within The Wiener Library. During a funding crisis in 1974, it was decided to move a part of the collection to
Tel Aviv. In the course of the preparations for this move, a large part of the collections was microfilmed for conservation purposes. The plans to move the library were abandoned in 1980 after the transports had already begun, resulting in a separate Wiener Library within the library of the
University of Tel Aviv that consisted of the majority of the book stock, while The Wiener Library in London retained the microfilmed copies. Today, The Wiener Holocaust Library is a research library dedicated to studying the
Holocaust,
comparative genocide studies,
Nazi Germany, and
German Jewry, and documenting
Antisemitism and
Neonazism. It is a
registered charity under English law. In 2011, it moved from Devonshire Street to new premises in Russell Square. Much of the artwork of
Fred Kormis, creator of England's first Holocaust memorial, was displayed at an exhibition at the library, which was scheduled to run until 6 February 2025. ==Collections and Outreach==