The documentation of and research into the history of German Jews during this period was already initiated during the Nazi regime, continuing a rich heritage of Modern Jewish historiography which began in Nineteenth Century Germany. As early as the 1930s, Alfred Wiener started collecting documents regarding the persecution of the Jews, and in so doing laid the foundation for the Wiener Library, whose two branches still exist, in London and Tel Aviv. Another rich documentary collection was created in 1940 in a composition writing competition at Harvard University, where immigrants and refugees from Germany were asked to write about their lives before and after 1933.
After the end of World War II, a chapter of documenting and studying the history of the Nazi period in Germany began in various frameworks. The investigation of the perpetrators’ perspective and the Nazi system was mainly conducted in Germany and North America. At the same time, and particularly following the Eichmann trial, people originating in the Jewish community in Germany started to study and document the history of the Jews in Germany under the Nazi regime, especially in the US and in Israel, among others within the Leo Baeck Institute, which has been active ever since, in Jerusalem, New York, London, and Berlin. At Yad Vashem, the main documentation on this topic was coordinated by Kurt Jacob Ball-Kaduri, whose collection of documents is now cataloged under O1 in the Yad Vashem archive. The project of Toldot HaShoah Germania, published in two volumes by Yad Vashem Publications in 1998, edited by Avraham Margaliot and Yehoyakim Kochavi, offers a concise summary of the research legacy of the first generation of Israeli scholars who dealt with the topic, most of whom were originally from the German Jewish community. Another leading project led by Yad Vashem during those decades was the Pinkas Kehilot Germania.
Even in the third decade of the Twenty-First Century, the study of German Jewry in general and under Nazi rule in particular maintains its high level of interest among scholars in Israel, Germany and worldwide. Young researchers deal with this topic from various perspectives, and a wide array of research institutions strive to promote it. A fundamental fact that has to do with the potential of conducting integrative studies on this topic has to do with language: unlike research done on the Holocaust in different areas, in the case of Germany, the language of the resources of both victims and perpetrators is one and the same.
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