Digital eyewitness testimonies – eyewitness interviews of diverse provenance

Eyewitness reports are irreplaceable sources that enable us to experience history at first hand. They help us understand what happened in the past and raise our awareness of what is happening today.
These valuable testimonies by contemporary witnesses have been recorded and preserved over the last few decades to ensure that they are not lost to posterity. This will also enable future generations to study them. The German Exile Archive makes its collection of interviews with eyewitnesses available in digital format and provides access to the digitised collections of other institutions.

Overview of the digitised collections of eyewitness interviews

Eyewitness interviews in the collection of the German Exile Archive 1933-1945

Interviews with eyewitnesses are important historical sources for researchers. The German Exile Archive's collection accordingly contains interviews on flight, exile and emigration from Nazi Germany both in individual estates and in personal archives amassed by researchers.

Eyewitness interviews held by the German Exile Archive 1933–1945

As part of the virtual exhibition "Arts in Exile", the German Exile Archive conducted interviews with eyewitnesses who fled into exile during the Nazi era and others who later emigrated from the German Democratic Republic. These recordings complement the extensive collection held by the German Exile Archive.
In the catalogue

Visual History Archive at the Shoah-Foundation

The Visual History Archive offers access to the oral history collections of the USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education. The ISC Shoah Foundation's mission was to document the personal experiences of as many living witnesses of the Holocaust as possible. The collection consists of more than 50,000 interviews recorded in 56 countries and 32 languages between 1994 and 2000. This makes it the world's largest collection of interviews on the Holocaust.
In the catalogue

Archiv der Flucht (Archive of Refuge)

As part of a large-scale oral history project, the Archiv der Flucht (Archive of Refuge) has collected interviews on camera with 41 participants who came to Germany between 1945 and 2016. They come from 27 countries in South America, Africa, East and South-East Europe, the Near and Middle East, and East and South-East Asia, and tell their stories of escape in nine languages. Their stories cover a wide range of social and cultural backgrounds, religions, sexual orientations and social strata.
In the catalogue