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Interview Collections

As more time passes since the Nazi era, fewer and fewer survivors are able to share their personal memories firsthand. Their life stories have been documented and cataloged in various large-scale oral history projects and made available for educational and research purposes. Freie Universität Berlin offers access to various significant interview collections on Nazism and the Holocaust through licensing agreements.
In addition, the Digital Interview Collections team has built such archives itself with the online archives “Forced Labor 1939–1945” and “Memories of the Occupation in Greece.” Beyond this historical focus, new collections have been created since 2018 on the history of Freie Universität, the GDR border regime, the German sect settlement “Colonia Dignidad” in Chile, and church asylum. Through the cataloging and research platform Oral-History.Digital, additional interview collections from Freie Universität and external partners are made accessible.

Visual History Archive

The Visual History Archive of the “USC Shoah Foundation. The Institute for Visual History and Education” is the world’s largest oral history collection. It contains more than 60,000 videotaped interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides. The Visual History Archive is accessible to members of Freie Universität Berlin via the campus network. Guests can access the archive on request in a room at the Central Library.

Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies

Since 1979, Yale University’s “Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies” has been recording testimonies from Holocaust survivors to preserve their memories and make them available to researchers and the interested public. Today, it contains nearly 4,500 interviews with Holocaust survivors in 22 languages, with a total duration of over 12,000 hours. The archive is considered a pioneer in the field of videotaped oral history. The collection is available to FU members via the campus network. Guests can access the archive on request in a media room at the Central Library.

Final Account: Third Reich Testimonies

The collection was compiled between 2008 and 2017 by British documentary filmmaker Luke Holland and comprises 295 filmed interviews. It includes life story interviews with men and women born between 1905 and 1934. The interviewees are predominantly German and Austrian, but also include people from other countries who were asked about their memories of and involvement in National Socialism, the Holocaust, and World War II.

Thanks to a collaboration between the University Library and University College London, the Vienna Holocaust Library, the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, and Luke Holland’s ZEF Productions, interested researchers can access the collection after registering in Room 118 of the Central Library.

Refugee Voices

The Association of Jewish Refugee's “Refugee Voices” testimoiny collection contains 310 video interviews with Jewish survivors of the Nazi regime living in the United Kingdom. The interviews were conducted in English.

Members of Freie Universität Berlin can access the “Refugee Voices” archive after registering. To verify your affiliation with Freie Universität Berlin, you must provide your FU email address during registration.

Interview-Portal "Oral-History.Digital"

“Oral-History.Digital” is an infrastructure for scholarly collections of audiovisually recorded narrative interviews. The interview portal and research environment allows cross-collection search, annotation, analysis and quotation over 5000+ interviews from 50+ institutions. The curation environment supports interview projects in archiving, indexing and giving controlled access according to the FAIR principles.

Forced Labor 1939-1945. Memory and History

The "Forced Labor 1939–1945" interview archive preserves the memory of the more than twenty million people subjected to forced labor under Nazi Germany. Nearly 600 former forced laborers from 26 countries recount their life stories in detailed audio and video interviews. The interviews were transcribed, translated into German, and cataloged at Freie Universität and are available online via the Oral-History.Digital platform after registration.

Colonia Dignidad. A Chilean-German oral history archive

The interview archive contains 72 life story interviews with (former) cult members, political prisoners, relatives of disappeared, and other witnesses to the history of “Colonia Dignidad”. The video interviews, conducted in German or Spanish, have been transcribed, translated, catalogued and made available on a bilingual platform. They can be accessed online after registration.

Memories of the Occupation in Greece

The interview archive “Memories of the Occupation in Greece” contains 93 video interviews with witnesses of the German occupation of Greece during WW2. The Greek-language interviews were recorded as part of a joint project between Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Athens, translated into German, edited for academic purposes, and made available via Oral-History.Digital on a bilingual online archive. Access is available after online registration.

Living History. Freie Universität Berlin

Since 2019, the “Living History” project has been documenting, through video interviews, the memories of people who worked, taught, carried out research and studied at Freie Universität Berlin, and who have shaped the university.

After registering, more than 100 interviews are available in an online archive. In addition, there is the online exhibition “Living History. People tell their stories with Freie Universität Berlin”, featuring curated topic videos and biographical portrait films.

Iron Curtain: Fatal Escapes and Judicial Abuse Against Citizens Seeking to Emigrate and Refugees

The collection contains 16 video interviews with relatives, friends, and fellow refugees of East Germans who lost their lives at the inner-German border, in the Baltic Sea, and at the “extended wall” of the Iron Curtain. Some interviews deal with emigration applications and successful escapes. The full-length interviews are available in an online archive after registration. Excerpts from the interviews are also included in a biographical handbook of the victims.

40 Years Church Asylum in Berlin

This archive contains interviews on the history of church asylum in Berlin, produced as part of a collaborative project between Asyl in der Kirche Berlin-Brandenburg e.V., the Institute of Philosophy, and the University Library at Freie Universität Berlin.

Interview Catalog "Campscapes Testimonies"

The „Campscapes Testimonies“ catalogue of audio- and video-recorded interviews assists researchers, memorial museums, educators and visitors in tracing interviews with survivors of the Nazi camps Westerbork (Netherlands), Treblinka (Poland), Falstad (Norway), Jasenovac (Croatia), Bergen-Belsen (Germany) and Lety (Czech Republic) as well as the Stalinist camp Jáchymov (Czech Republic). It was created in the 2017-2029 project "Accessing Campscapes: Inclusive Strategies for Using European Conflicted Heritage".