EHRI-IP

The VWI, together with other EHRI partner institutions, successfully applied for and was awarded the EHRI Implementation Phase Project (EHRI-IP) as part of the HORIZON-INFRA-2023 call. The main task of the project, which will run from February 2024 to the end of January 2026, is to coordinate the transformation of EHRI into a permanent European research infrastructure under the name EHRI-ERIC. EHRI-ERIC was founded in January 2025 and is currently being further developed and expanded.

Within the framework of EHRI-IP, the VWI is leading Work Package 6, “Acquisition of New Members and Funding,” which aims to monitor the landscape of Holocaust studies and the representation of individual countries and institutions in the EHRI portal in order to identify potential member and observer countries with high priority and support them in the accession process. In addition, potential sources of funding at the transnational, transregional, national, and local levels are being identified in order to support the financial sustainability of EHRI-ERIC.

Furthermore, the VWI is actively involved in three other EHRI-IP work packages. WP3, “Strengthening of National Nodes,” led by MÚA/Prague, focuses on supporting the development, communication, and service catalog of the national consortia in EHRI-ERIC, the establishment of the National Coordinator Committee (NCC), and the creation of working groups. In WP 4 “Science, User and Technological Strategies,” led by IfZ/Munich, the VWI contributes to the conceptualization of a future regular central survey of the EHRI Fellowship Program, which is not only important for the further orientation of EHRI-ERIC, but also for a more in-depth overview of the state of Holocaust research in Europe and beyond. In WP 5, “Internationalization and Partnerships,” led by Yad Vashem/Jerusalem, the VWI participates in the global networking of EHRI-ERIC, and supported for example the organization of a workshop on strategic partnerships in Vienna in September 2025.

‘My Polish Diary‘: An edition and remembrance project on the memoirs of a gendarme from Austria in Nazi-occupied Poland

The Austrian gendarme Adolf Landl was deployed in the German service in the Kielce area during the Second World War and secretly reported to the Polish resistance from 1941 onwards about planned murder operations against the Polish and Jewish population. In doing so, he saved the lives of numerous people. He was supported by his colleague Josef Rothwein, who was deployed as a clerk in the Kielce gendarmerie.

In contrast to Josef Rothwein, Adolf Landl survived the war, but struggled with an Austrian society in which former perpetrators could even return to the police force. In Poland, among the former partisans with whom he kept in touch by letter, he felt better understood and even visited Łopuszno in 1960, the place behind the Iron Curtain where he had been stationed from 1941.

Adolf Landl's memoirs, which he wrote many years after the war under the title ‘My Polish Diary’, relentlessly depict the brutal everyday life of the occupation in Poland from the perspective of someone directly involved. Discovered after his death in 1963, the diary triggered a public prosecutor's investigation in Austria against former colleagues, which led to a trial against the gendarmerie captain of Kielce, Gerulf Mayer, in 1969. Mayer was sentenced to eleven years in prison. In the course of their enquiries, Austrian police officers even investigated with Polish colleagues on the ground. Simon Wiesenthal was directly involved in the investigations into the crimes in the Kielce area.

The VWI is currently researching the ‘Landl case’ in archives in Austria and abroad and is working - together with the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW) and the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) in Leipzig - on a critical academic edition of Landl's memoirs.

EHRI-3

The ambition of the first two cycles (2010–2019) of the project European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) was to enable new trans-national Holocaust research by overcoming the existing widespread dispersal and fragmentation of archival sources and expertise and to ease the application of methods of trans-national research.
In February 2020, a second extension of the project was granted. EHRI-3’s general objective follows the line(s) of EHRI-1/2 and intends to substantially and sustainably advance the integration and opening up of existing Holocaust archives and collections by

• enhancing EHRI’s digital infrastructure and services;
• networking new research and archival communities;
• (expanding EHRI’s access programmes and user bases;
• undertaking localisation and capacity building activities; and
• establishing new trans-national thematic layers across the integrated data content.

VWI will be active in four work packages, thus work on a substantial advancement of the EHRI Online Portal, especially focussing on the EHRI-Document-Blog, working on a dashboard that allow tracing of trans-national actors and cross-border processes across integrated date content as well as building up a regional data integration hubs.
Again, VWI will participate in the Workpackage Transnational Access and host EHRI-Fellows. To honour the memory of EHRI’s first project director, Conny Kristel, the trans-national access provided by
EHRI are now called „Conny Kristel EHRI Fellowships“.

Accessing Campscapes

Inclusive Strategies for Using European Conflicted Heritage (iC-ACCESS, HERA 2016-2018)

The VWI is an associate partner in a project in the framework of the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) Programmes of the EU. Accessing Campscapes: Inclusive Strategies for Using European Conflicted Heritage (iC-ACCESS) investigates the traces of mass violence and mass terror in the twentieth century; investigates the still tangible pieces of memory in the age of extremes and their application in (trans)national contexts.

Jewish Slaves in a ‘Jew-free’ City

The Topography of Jewish Hungarian Forced Labour in Vienna 1944/45

VWI’s intervention ‚Bewegt Erinnern/Moving Remembrance‘ in May 2014 led to the idea of ​​using a website to topographically depict the fate of Hungarian-Jewish forced labour in Vienna in 1944/45. With this website, which initially focused on the former Nazi-Gau Groß-Wien, the individual places of accommodation, care and employment of the forced labourers were (re) localised, documented and described. The website intends to impart and deepen knowledge of the living and working conditions of Hungarian-Jewish forced labourers in order to also advance further research.

The interactive map is the result of  a VWI-project  funded for two years by the Foundation for Remembrance, Responsibility and Future and was supported in terms of content and organsation by the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe as well. The research project was advised by a small consortium consisting of Haver, Zachor and the Association of Hungarian History Teachers, Budapest.

Many places, documents, circumstances, stories, photos and objects from this for a long time marginalised episode of the Holocaust have still not been explored and are still waiting to be discovered. A goal of this presentation is – in addition to the intention to snatch this story from the forgotten – also to make these objects, memories and documents visible, to recall the history of forced labour in Vienna.

The project was completed in spring 2018.

In December 2019, the follow-up project Sidetrack Strasshof. Hungarian-Jewish forced labour in the Vienna area (1944/1945) – submitted with the University of Szeged as a project partner – was granted by to the Hungarian National Office for Research, Development and Innovation (NKFIH)  and the Austrian FWF.

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European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI)

The VWI has been a member of an EU-sponsored research consortium since 2010. The main aim of EHRI – European Holocaust Research Infrastructure – is to develop lasting opportunities for networking. This is intended to foster innovative documentation methods and research guidelines for research infrastructures that have to date only been used on a national basis. The first phase of EHRI from 2010 to 2014 consisted of designing online tools by the consortium members, linking databases of scattered archives with Holocaust-relevant documents, and developing new research topics and questions.

This project, funded by twenty research institutions across twelve European states – Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and the United Kingdom – as well as Israel, was funded by a grant applied for in the framework of the seventh funding programme of the EU and granted a total of seven million Euros by the European Commission. Over its four-year duration, it created structures for an enduring network of European research and archive resources on the history of the Holocaust. The most important partners were Yad Vashem (Jerusalem), CEGES-SOMA (Brussels), King’s College London, the Jewish Museum in Prague, the Institute for Contemporary History in Berlin and Munich, as well as NIOD – Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Amsterdam), which coordinated the entire project.

Within the framework of Work Package 2 of the project, the VWI developed a research initiative for Holocaust-relevant archives of Jewish communities in Eastern and Central Europe in collaboration with the Jewish Museum in Prague, the research centre at Terezín, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Centre in Budapest, as well as the archive of the IKG in Vienna, and established infrastructure and networking tools for archival resources. In 2015, he project was extended for four more years.

In the framework of EHRI-2, the VWI explored the possibilities of expanding the infrastructures developed in EHRI-1 and of making them more sustainable, but also of ways to make scattered, smaller, hardly known collections that are nevertheless relevant to Holocaust research (more) accessible and to expand existing research infrastructure through digital platforms, repositories, and databases, as well as through online curricula, exhibitions, and presentations on specific research projects and/or case studies in Holocaust research.

The focus here was on topical questions regarding digital archival collections in Central Europe with a view toward discussing and developing organisational and legal guidelines and procedures for the transnationalisation of Holocaust research networks and archives, with an emphasis on local approaches and regional concerns regarding current usage of Holocaust sources. Such local approaches were to be connected with other projects from Central Europe in order to create a network by and for these initiatives transcending ethnic, linguistic, and/or national boundaries, which could thereby overcome previous impediments to opening up space for innovative approaches.

The institute was moreover connected to the EHRI fellowship programme and was thereby able to provide scholarly supervision to eight fellows over the duration of the project and to integrate them into the research activities of the institute.

EHRI-2, in the framework of which the VWI organised the workshops Transnational meets Local: Making Holocaust Research Projects and Infrastructures Sustainable by Using Digital Archives, Electronic Repositories, and Internet Platforms on Local and Regional Levels (19/20 November 2018) and “It Happened Here!” 
Digital and Shared: Holocaust History in Public Space” (1/2 April 2019), concluded in October 2019.

As of December 2019, a new three-year project, which will also be funded by the EU, will prepare the establishment of a European research consortium for Holocaust research in the framework of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI).

The aim of this strategy to establish European research infrastructures is to overcome the boundaries that have arisen as a result of the fragmentation of isolated national research policies, to provide an opportunity to respond quickly to new research questions, and to advance knowledge-based technologies and their increased implementation.

In the framework of this project, the VWI will initially participate in the establishment of an Austrian Holocaust research infrastructure.

http://www.ehri-project.eu

Wie sich NationalsozialistInnen selbst sahen. Opferthese und „Ehemalige“
(The de-Nazification Discourse of Former Nazis since 1945)

Project in co-operation with the Centre for Jewish Cultural History at the University of Salzburg

This project of the Centre for Jewish Cultural History at the University of Salzburg is funded by the Jubiläumsfonds of the Austrian National Bank and examines self-appraisals of former Nazis. To begin with, applications made to the federal government and collected in the Austrian state archive were quantified and discourse-analytically examined in order to establish how Austria’s “first victim” claim of the time was reflected in the way “former Nazis” depicted themselves. Due to time and financial constraints, it was not possible within the project framework to expand the resulting findings by including the files from the “People’s Courts” established in Austria between 1945 and 1955 to deal with Nazi crimes. However, it was desirable to include this source material in a more inclusive study in order to illuminate the perspective of the perpetrators and thus be able to elaborate more effectively on the justifications that were provided as well as their evaluations by the investigating offices or the People’s Courts.

This follow-up project was conducted by the VWI in co-operation with the Centre for Jewish Cultural History. The project results were presented ready for publication in a final report in 2013.

The project was conducted by Siegfried Göllner and supervised by Albert Lichtblau.

Austrian Heritage Archive

Digital Collection of Biographical Interviews with Jewish Austrian Emigrants to the USA and Israel

The Austrian Heritage Archive (AHA) is an online archive comprising audio and video interviews as well as a selection of biographical materials pertaining to Jewish Austrian emigrants who survived National Socialism and who live(d) in the USA or Palestine/Israel. The database was developed between 2013 and 2017 by a team of historians and programmers under the direction of Philipp Rohrbach (Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, VWI) and Adina Seeger (Verein GEDENKDIENST) and was financed by the National Funds of the Republic of Austriafor Victims of National Socialism, the Future Funds of the Republic of Austria, the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research, and the VWI. The scholarly advisor for this project was Prof. Albert Lichtblau.

Following its completion in October 2017, the database was presented to the public at the Chamber of Labour in Vienna and has since then been accessible online under www.austrianheritagearchive.at.

At present, the AHA website contains 20 full-length interviews that have been transcribed and augmented with biographical materials. The interviews and corresponding materials form a part of the over 800 interviews of the Austrian Heritage Collection (AHC) – one of the largest collections relating to Jewish Austrian emigration to the USA and to Israel. The interviews were conducted, recorded, and archived over the past 20 years at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York and since 2013 at the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem by young Austrians who were sent to the respective countries by the Verein GEDENKDIENST.

The current project will run for 24 months and aims to achieve the following:

1) Since the presentation of the Austrian Heritage Archive in October 2017, some 4,000 users from over 40 countries have used the online archive. Based on feedback from users and experts, the online appearance of the Austrian Heritage Archive will be optimised, with the website menus being simplified, the search and access speed being increased, and the full-text searches and keyword-annotation of the contents (interviews, documents, and photos) being enhanced. Moreover, a mobile version of the AHA website will be created for mobile telephones and tablets.

2) A further 20 interviews will be edited, transcribed, and prepared for publication in the Austrian Heritage Archive.

3) Prof. Albert Lichtblau will author a book on the Austrian Heritage Collection (AHC) in New York, which will be published in the studies series of the VWI. Alongside a description of the origins of the project and the design of the AHC, he will evaluate the 1,800 or so completed forms of Questionnaire 2 that have been collected by the GEDENKDIENST volunteers at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York since 1996. In these extraordinary source materials, the Jewish Austrian emigrant and survivor respondents supplied information on their personal memories in their own words. Wherever relevant or necessary, these statements will be compared to the interviews, documents, and memoirs held in the Austrian Heritage Collection in New York. The planned book will present and analyse the breadth of experiences and processes of coming to terms of Jewish Austrian emigrants and survivors in the USA.