The years immediately following the Holocaust witnessed an extraordinary effort by Jewish survivors, refugees and exiled intellectuals, and other activists to preserve evidence of destruction and establish historical truth. Recent historiography has challenged earlier assumptions that the postwar period represented a moment of silence or rupture, instead demonstrating the extent to which survivors engaged in documenting, collecting, publishing, testifying, and institution-building immediately after (and in some cases even before) liberation.

Although these activities can be framed as commemorative or restorative impulses, they also represented sustained efforts to resist the destruction of evidence and memory itself and to establish durable foundations for future scholarship and justice. Documentation was therefore a form of intellectual and cultural resistance to the aims of the Nazis and their collaborators of destroying not only a people, but traces of their existence.

Recent scholarship has also highlighted that early survivor-documenters developed conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches and created transnational networks of knowledge production extending across Europe, Israel and beyond. These networks did not disappear with the transition from survivor-led initiatives to more academic institutions; rather they evolved and became embedded within emerging centres of Nazi era and Holocaust research.

These networks can only be reconstructed through a transnational approach because the documentary traces of early Holocaust knowledge production are inherently dispersed across institutions and national historiographies, and many of the methods through which knowledge circulated, collections were assembled, and evidence was authenticated remain insufficiently understood. No single institution or national historiography preserves these networks in their entirety.

This two-day workshop explores how such networks may be reconstructed and analysed through innovative scholarly, archival and digital methodologies, treating documentation both as historical evidence but also as acts of resistance and forms of knowledge production. The aim is to develop methods for researching transnational Holocaust documentation networks using new technologies and methods and facilitate transnational knowledge exchange.

The workshop will take place at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, 1-2 December 2026.
The submission deadline for papers is 24 August 2026.

For detailed information on the workshop and on how to apply please see the full Call for Papers. 

Organisers:
Christine Schmidt (Wiener Holocaust Library, London)
Stefanie Rauch (Wiener Holocaust Library, London)
Andrea Löw (Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History)
Johannes Meerwald (Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History)
Dan Stone (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Victoria Van Orden Martínez (North European Center for Research on Antisemitism and the Holocaust, Lund University)
Henrik Rosengren (North European Center for Research on Antisemitism and the Holocaust, Lund University)
Amir Teicher (Wiener Library for the Study of the Nazi Era and the Holocaust, Tel Aviv)
Laure-Line Yehuda (Wiener Library for the Study of the Nazi Era and the Holocaust, Tel Aviv)