In 1946, the American social psychologist David P. Boder traveled to Europe to record testimonies of displaced persons – voices of survivors of Nazi persecution and the Holocaust. After these interviews were long forgotten, they are now online. German historians have now put an interdisciplinary blog online that sheds light on the background and research on these interviews.
Many contemporary witnesses of the Holocaust and the Nazi era have now died – it is all the more important to preserve their testimonies for posterity. The first to pursue this goal was the American social psychologist David P. Boder. After the end of the Second World War, he saw the shocking images from the liberated concentration camps, but missed the voices as testimony of the survivors.
Unique eyewitness reports
Broder therefore traveled to Europe in the summer of 1946 and conducted over 100 interviews with so-called displaced persons – the survivors who had been robbed of their homeland by war, Nazi persecution and concentration camps. He wanted to ask these uprooted people about their personal experiences in the war as soon as possible and preserve their stories for posterity. He stored the voices of the survivors on 200 wire clay reels. The world’s first collection of audio interviews with survivors of the Shoah emerged from the more than 90 hours of interviews.
But Boder’s goal to publish these interviews largely failed. In 1961 he bequeathed part of the recordings to several libraries in the United States, including the Library of Congress. But after his death in the same year, the unique collection was forgotten, and the voices of the survivors went unheard for decades. It was not until 1998 that US historians began to work on the project “Voices of the Holocaust“With digitizing the records and gradually putting the eyewitness interviews online. Today they are freely available on the Internet.
Platform for findings and questions about the interviews
“With the voices of Displaced Persons from the summer of 1946 – recorded 75 years ago – a unique collection of interviews has been preserved,” says Thomas Krüger, President of the Federal Agency for Civic Education. “So far it is quite unknown, but there is great potential for historical and political education in Boder’s archive.” In order to promote awareness of the interviews and to make more public about their background, the historian Axel Doßmann from Friedrich Schiller University Jena and his Berlin colleague Lisa Schank have now initiated and posted a weblog that offers in-depth knowledge of all aspects of contemporary witness interviews.
With the weblog “Questions to Displaced Persons: 1946 and today“Curiosity should also be aroused: What were Boder’s questions to the survivors? One year after the end of the war, how did these – Jewish and non-Jewish – people talk about their families, about violence, forced labor, deportation, about life and death in ghettos and concentration camps? What did they expect from the future? At the same time, it should be asked how people of today classify these life-historical interpretations. The researchers also want to share their findings on the afterlife of the former displaced persons on this platform.
“The new blog from the University of Jena presents interdisciplinary research on these interviews, invites you to participate and supports understanding hearing,” says Krüger. The blog, which is designed to be participative, aims to promote methodological and questioning skills and publicize various research approaches. Schank and Doßmann see the blog as a platform for joint reflection, including the educational challenges of media-based testimony. All interested parties are invited to write contributions.
Source: Friedrich Schiller University Jena; Blog “Questions to Displaced Persons: 1946 and today“