While filming Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg initiated a project to document eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust. This project was to be carried out by the non-profit organisation Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (Shoah Foundation), established in 1994. The aim was to film, catalogue and archive approximately 50,000 interviews with Holocaust survivors. By 1999, 52,000 interviews had been conducted in 56 countries and 32 languages, not only with Jewish survivors but also with members of other persecuted groups, such as Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political prisoners and survivors of eugenics policies. Interviews were also conducted with rescuers, helpers, liberators and witnesses to liberation, as well as participants in war crimes trials.

By 2006, the collected film material, amounting to approximately 120,000 hours, had been reviewed, catalogued, indexed and made available in the Visual History Archive. This archive is the world’s largest collection of interviews on National Socialism and the Holocaust. The Visual History Archive is currently being expanded to include collections of interviews with survivors and witnesses of other genocides and mass atrocities.

These include, among others, collections of interviews with survivors of the Nanjing Massacre (1937), the Armenian Genocide (1915–1923), the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda (1994), the genocide in Guatemala (1978–1996), the Cambodian genocide under the Khmer Rouge (1975–1979), the civil war in South Sudan (2013–2018), the civil war in the Central African Republic (2013–2018), the persecution and displacement of the Rohingya in Myanmar (August–October 2017) and the war and genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as contemporary antisemitism (since 2015).