Simon Wiesenthal’s Life’s Work as Digital Cultural Heritage (Sites and Complexes of Crime) In 1945, Simon Wiesenthal was liberated from the Mauthausen concentration camp. He immediately devoted himself to a task that would define the rest of his life: bringing the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice. In doing so, he sought to preserve the memory of these crimes of the century. Over the following 60 years, he amassed a unique collection of archival, visual and audio documents, as well as correspondence, which today constitute an important part of Austria’s cultural heritage.

At the core of Wiesenthal’s documentation activities are 4,483 case files on Nazi perpetrators, sites and complexes of Nazi crimes. These were compiled until 2005 by Wiesenthal and the staff of the Documentation Centre of the Association of Jews Persecuted by the Nazi Regime (BJVN).

The digitisation of the sub-collection of thematic and location-based case files, comprising 1,768 files, 3,993 sub-files and approximately 130,000 scans, is the third step in the gradual digitisation of the entire body of Nazi case files. Two previous projects focusing on the digitisation and cataloguing of image sources and personal records have already been completed in recent years. The files to be digitised in this project can be assigned to various thematic or geographical focal points. These include groups of victims or perpetrators, geographical areas such as states, crime sites or camp complexes, and specific thematic topics.

The digital copies are catalogued using the ActaPro archival information system and can be searched using keywords. Metadata can be accessed via the archive’s website or on site, where the holdings themselves can also be consulted. Digital copies may be provided to users outside Vienna, worldwide, upon specific request and in compliance with legal restrictions. The metadata is also made available to Holocaust researchers worldwide via the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) portal. It will also be searchable via Europeana and Kulturpool.