Too German for Holocaust Research? Alfred Wiener and Louis de Jong on the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 1952

In October 1952, Alfred Wiener and Louis de Jong compared notes on the still relatively new Institute for Contemporary History in Munich (Institut für Zeitgeschichte, IfZ), wondering whether its staff members would be capable of conducting research on National Socialism. While non-Jewish German researchers claimed that Jews were too preoccupied with and emotional about the Holocaust, these two Jewish researchers raised questions concerning the Germans’ political affiliations. 

‘I was very glad’, Louis de Jong wrote to Alfred Wiener,

that you may be coming to Amsterdam in the near future. If so, we might exchange our ideas as to the Munich Institute. My general impression is that these people are German nationalists like most Germans still are, but I was definitely unable to detect any trace of nazi influence. They really intend to publish many documents which will unveil the brutal policy of the SS, and they have recently approached the Rockefeller Foundation for a grant to enable them to set up a special bureau for a study of the history of German Jewry during the nazi period.¹

Wiener replied on 20 October (‘Your report on Munich has interested me immensely’)² and then addressed the issue once again eight days later:

I am of the opinion that the institutes outside Germany which are engaged in the research of the National Socialist era would be ill advised would they continue to ignore the institutes in Munich and Goettingen. My reservations with regard to certain personalities of either Institute are certainly being shared by you and it will be advisable to watch carefully further developments. Yet, their work has to be taken seriously and should become part of our international cooperation. I shall go into this matter in more detail when seeing you personally.³

This is more than just academic gossip. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, Jewish researchers watched new developments in Germany very closely, especially regarding research on National Socialism and the Holocaust. The fact that the IfZ’s staff members were non-Jewish made a closer inspection even more pressing. It was important to de Jong and Wiener to understand why the Institute had been founded and what interests lay behind it.⁴ Both researchers were at that time directors of research institutes devoted to researching National Socialism and the Holocaust, and both seem to have felt the need to discuss the new IfZ with a fellow Jewish researcher. Wiener headed the Wiener Library, originally founded as the Jewish Central Information Officein Amsterdam in 1933/4 and based in London from 1939, while de Jong was the director of the Dutch National Institute for War Documentation (Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie), which was established in Amsterdam in 1945. In their letters they exchanged not only ideas on potential colleagues but also information about historical events and personalities, as well as books and other publications which were not available in their respective countries.⁵

After their correspondence, Wiener did indeed visit Amsterdam and meet with de Jong to discuss the IfZ’s role in Holocaust research, as a short report reveals. Written by Wiener for internal purposes and sent to his staff members back in London while he was still in Amsterdam, the report described de Jong’s impression of the IfZ. According to Wiener, de Jong doubted that the Institute’s ‘suffocating [erdrückend]’ programme could be realized as planned, and advised him not to be discouraged by it. De Jong even described it as ‘window-dressing’ for purely financial reasons. As Wiener wrote:

He [de Jong] has the impression that the Institute has been opened more for the sake of the outside world (for the Allied governments) than for the sake of being an academic institute for the handling of documents (to show how seriously Germans were taking the study of Nazi documents in order to smooth the path for their return). Dr Krausnick made a good impression on him. Other than that, he said, although those preparing the documents were not Nazis, they were still old-school nationalists. He added that research into the Nazi period abroad was more important than ever.⁶

The report continues by stating that de Jong felt there was no need to visit the IfZ if one was not otherwise in Munich. If we can trust Wiener’s report, de Jong expressed a highly critical opinion of the IfZ to him. It sheds light on de Jong’s deep scepticism towards the German scholars working at the IfZ and the Institute’s purpose more generally. To know where the Institute stood politically was of the utmost importance to both de Jong and Wiener, as it was closely linked to the question of how reliable the IfZ’s research on National Socialism and the Holocaust was. De Jong’s judgement that the IfZ’s staff members were not Nazis but German nationalists is illuminating with regard to the Institute’s position in the sphere of early Holocaust research. Since this field was still very young and its scholars almost all Jewish, non-Jews, and particularly German non-Jews, were understandably regarded with a certain suspicion.

Notwithstanding this scepticism, both de Jong and Wiener continued to be in close contact with staff members of the IfZ and participated in a conference organized by the Institute in 1956. But it is Wiener’s collaboration with the Institute that stands out. Around two years later, the Wiener Library and the IfZ began negotiations about a joint research project concerned with the persecution and annihilation of European Jewry. On over 1,000 pages of letters, staff members from both institutes discussed both the content of the project and practical questions around it – yet it never came into being, despite seven years of talks. While these direct negotiations between the two institutes will form one aspect of my ongoing PhD research, the correspondence with third parties, such as Louis de Jong, is also of interest, as it reveals how Wiener formed his opinion on the IfZ, especially concerning its non-Jewish staff members and their political views.

Wiener and de Jong’s correspondence is just one of many examples relevant to the historicization of early Holocaust research. Far from being isolated nationally or restricted to one language, early Jewish Holocaust researchers were keen to foster international contacts, mostly through extensive correspondence. Despite their different national, cultural, and political backgrounds and their personal experiences during the Holocaust, they shared the ambition of researching the Jewish catastrophe and making themselves heard. While not all exchanges between researchers culminated in cooperation, early Holocaust research was still a joint, transnational endeavour by Jews in many places around the world.

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Feature Image: The present-day Institut für Zeitgeschichte on Leonrodstraße in Munich (2020). Credit: Kaethe 17, CC BY-SA 4.0.

1. Louis de Jong to Alfred Wiener, 11 Oct. 1952 (3000/9/1/1149/58). Letters written in English. All letters cited are archived in the Early Years Collection of the Wiener Holocaust Library and catalogued in the following folder: 3000/9/1/1149/A/1-142, Correspondence with Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie 18 Sept. 1953–29 Dec. 1953. [↩]
2. Alfred Wiener to Louis de Jong, 20 Oct. 1952 (3000/9/1/1149/62). [↩]
3. Alfred Wiener to Louis de Jong, 28 Oct. 1952 (3000/9/1/1149/67). [↩]
4. For a bibliography of the history of the IfZ, see its website. For a critical perspective on the IfZ’s relationships with Jewish researchers, see Nicolas Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung und Erinnerung (Göttingen, 2003). [↩]
5. This year, the Wiener Library celebrates its ninetieth birthday, both on its website and with an exhibition at its premises on Russell Square, a few minutes’ walk away from the German Historical Institute London. On the history of the Wiener Library, see Ben Barkow, Alfred Wiener and the Making of the Holocaust Library (London, 1997); Christine Schmidt and Ben Barkow, ‘Frühe Holocaustforschung, “Zeugnis” und die Wiener Library’ / ‘Early Holocaust Research, “Testimony” and the Wiener Library’, in Hans-Christian Jasch and Stephan Lehnstaedt (eds.), Verfolgen und Aufklären: Die erste Generation der Holocaustforschung / Crimes Uncovered: The First Generation of Holocaust Researchers (Berlin, 2019), 302–27; and Christine Schmidt, ‘“We Are All Witnesses”: Eva Reichmann and the Wiener Library’s Eyewitness Accounts Collection’, in Thomas Kühne and Mary Jane Rein (eds.), Agency and the Holocaust: Essays in Honor of Debórah Dwork (Cham, 2020), 123–40. On the history of Holocaust research in the Netherlands, see Conny Kristel, ‘Survivors as Historians: Abel Herzberg, Jacques Presser and Loe de Jong on the Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands’, in David Bankier and Dan Michman (eds.), Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements (Jerusalem, 2008), 207–24. For a short biography of de Jong, see Nicole Calian, ‘Louis de Jong’, in Schmidt and Barkow (eds.), Verfolgen und Aufklären,108–11. For an overview of Dutch Holocaust historiography beyond the three most important researchers discussed by Kristel, see Ido de Haan, ‘The Paradoxes of Dutch History: Historiography of the Holocaust in the Netherlands’, in Bankier and Michman (eds.), Holocaust Historiography in Context, 355–76. [↩]
6. Report in German, translated by Josefine Langer Shoat. ‘Unterredung mit Drs. De Jong vom 29. November im Rijksinstituut von 11 Uhr–1 Uhr’, dated 30 Nov. 1952 (3000/9/1/1149/72/1): ‘Er [de Jong] habe den Eindruck, dass das Institut [für Zeitgeschichte] mehr nach aussen hin (fuer allierte Regierungen) als ein wissenschaftliches Institut zur Dokumentenbearbeitung aufgemacht sei (um zu zeigen, es sei den Deutschen ernst mit der wissenschaftlichen Bearbeitung der Nazi-Dokumente, um damit die Rueckgabe zu erleichtern). Von Dr. Krausnick hat er einen guten Eindruck. Sonst seien die Bearbeiter keine Nazis, aber doch Nationalisten der alten Schule. Die Forschung der Nazi-Periode im Ausland sei mehr denn je geboten.’  The German word aufmachen can mean both ‘to open (up)’ and ‘to present for effect’; it is unclear from Wiener’s report whether de Jong thought that the IfZ had been opened for specific reasons, or whether it was only disguising itself as a scientific institute. [↩]

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