During a routine inspection in 2000 of one of its older buildings, officials of the Jewish community Vienna (IKG) found a vacant apartment filled with documents in wooden cabinets and 800 cardboard boxes, covered with decades of dirt, dust, and mold. Some of these materials are part of a cache of approximately two million pages of Holocaust-era documents. These reports, letters, emigration and financial documents, deportation lists, card files, books, photographs, maps, and charts detail the final years of the Viennese Jewish community. They represent a substantial and long-forgotten part of the archive of what was once the largest German-speaking Jewish community in Europe. In 2002, the Museum and the IKG agreed to jointly rescue these materials and make them available to the public in Vienna and at the Museum in Washington.

Panelists highlight the discovery, rescue, and subsequent dissemination of this archive; its impact on the lives of survivors; its importance for the scholarly field of Holocaust studies at the Museum and at a planned Vienna Wiesenthal Institute; and preparations for an exhibition scheduled to open at the Jewish Museum Vienna (Austria) later this year.

Welcome:

Paul Shapiro, Director, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)

Roundtable Chair:

Suzanne Brown-Fleming, Senior Program Officer, University Programs Division, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, USHMM

Panel Participants:

Ingo Zechner, Director, Holocaust Victims’ Information and Support Center,Vienna, Austria

Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek, Chief Curator, Jewish Museum Vienna, Austria

Anatol Steck, Program Officer, International Archival Programs Division, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, USHMM

Walter B. Feiden, Holocaust survivor from Vienna currently living in New York, NY, and recently featured on the CBS 60 Minutes broadcast “Hitler's Secret Archive”

Learn more about this archival collection at http://www.ushmm.org/research/center/.

This roundtable discussion is supported by the Helena Rubinstein Foundation.