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Collection Guide: Oral Histories

Leo Baeck Institute

Archival Highlights

Austrian Heritage Collection

The Austrian Heritage Collection (AHC), a program whose specific goal is to document the history of Austrian-Jewish émigrés who fled to the USA or to (what is now) the State of Israel during the Nazi years, has been centered at the Leo Baeck Institutes in New York and in Jerusalem since 1996. Presently, there are more than 700 oral history interviews in the LBI’s Austrian Heritage Collection, and the number is growing fast. 

Fritz Henry Reuter Oral History (AR 11947)

This item is a typewritten and edited transcript of an oral history interview with food chemist Fritz Henry Reuter, prepared and conducted by the University Oral History Project in the University New South Wales in 1985. Most of the oral history concerns Reuter's work as a food chemist in Australia, but the first part deals with his youth and schooling in Germany.

Recollections of Klara and Otto Markstein (AR 10579)

Audio tape with recollections of Edith Löwenstein's parents, Klara and Otto Markstein. In the first part of the recording, Klara Markstein describes an emigration experience in Latin America (approximately 22 minutes). Then Otto Markstein recalls his experiences in Dachau or Buchenwald, including an escape of two other prisoners (approximately 15 minutes).

The oral history collection of the Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration, New York (AR 25385)

Audio and transcripts of interviews with 253 German Jewish refugees, who had settled in principal metropolitan areas of the United States during the main period of immigration, 1937-1941.

Library Materials

Crossing over : an oral history of emigrants from Hitler’s GermanyRuth Wolman. New York ; London : Twayne Publishers ; Prentice Hall International, 1996

Embattled selves : an investigation into the nature of identity through oral histories of Holocaust survivors Kenneth Jacobson. New York : Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994.

Oral history and the war : the Nazi concentration camp experience in a biographical-narrative perspectivePiotr Filipkowski ; translated by Tristan Korecki. Berlin : Peter Lang, [2019].

Witnesses to Nuremberg: an oral history of American participants at the war crimes trialsBruce M. Stave and Michele Palmer, with Leslie Frank. Series: Twayne's oral history series no. 27.