Das DÖW und das USHMM unterzeichneten am 16. Dezember 2024 eine Kooperationsvereinbarung zur Digitalisierung von Beständen aus dem DÖW. Dieser Bestand wird nach den neuesten technischen Verfahren digitalisiert und wird dann auch Forscher*innen in den USA zur Verfügung stehen. Anlässlich der Unterzeichnung des Vertrags hielt DÖW-Leiter Andreas Kranebitter in der Österreichischen Botschaft in Washington DC folgende Rede (im englischen Wortlaut):

Dear Ambassador Schneebauer, dear Special Envoy Ellen Germain, dear colleagues and friends at the USHMM, and, not least dear American Friends of the DÖW, our friendship association here in the US!

When the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance (DÖW) was founded in 1963, this was, in many ways, an extremely unlikely act. True: Due to the Moscow Declaration of 1943, Austria was required to provide evidence of activities against National Socialism, i.e. to officially document the resistance in terms. Yet, after the state treaty of 1955, when the Allies had left Austria (and left Austria to the Austrians, if you like), there was little interest and little necessity in doing so anymore. In Austria in the late 1950s, former Nazis quickly made a career for themselves, while the victims of National Socialism were pushed aside.

It was under these circumstances, in the midst of the Cold War, that various and unlikely partners came together in Austria and founded the DÖW in its current form – as a non-partisan, independent association, research and documentation center. It was founded by former resistance fighters of all political backgrounds, including monarchists, conservatives, social democrats and communists, and those who had returned from exile, Jews and Non-Jews, quite many Holocaust survivors and committed academics among them. This was no small achievement, and in no small part it was due to Herbert Steiner, the first director of the DÖW.

In this respect, the Documentation Center was something of a counter-archive from the very beginning: the DÖW collected where others did not want to collect, told the history that others did not want to tell, but also supported the state where the state did not want to support itself.

To imagine the times we are talking about, you just have to take a look at the beginnings: In the early 1960s, the Standing Committee of one of the survivors’ organizations suggested to keep the original files of the DÖW in a Swiss bank safe and only work with copies in Austria. In 1962, the owner of a bookshop in Graz said he could not display one of our publications “without running the risk of having the windows smashed.”

Under these circumstances, it took some courage to set up an archive devoted to document resistance and persecution under national socialism.

Fortunately, much has changed to the better since 1963, and (since I am only director for a bit over a year now, I might say so) I think it safe to say that during the decades, the DÖW has contributed to this change, not least when it comes to the Republic of Austria admitting a joint responsibility for National Socialist crimes.

Today, we can refer to several acts of state sponsored tasks of commemoration, in other words an active commemoration policy (Gedenkpolitik) – and I am happy that the DÖW is an integral part of it. One example is the Wall of Names in Vienna, displaying 64.500 names of Austrian victims of the Shoah. It was done by the National Fund, with the names having been compiled by the Documentation Center over decades of work with partners like Yad Vashem.

However, we should not take this change for the better for granted. The extreme right in Austria’s politics is constantly calling it into question. That is why we question them, and a reason why we document and research the extreme right. An archive of resistance must also be a resistant archive against anti-democratic endeavors.

While, after all said, the Documentation Center emphasized “resistance” in its very title, it was always a Holocaust Archive, too. Not only were many of our founders Jewish or were declared Jews under the Nuremberg Laws, but often they understood their survival as resistance, as Joseph Moser put it. Our collections documented the Holocaust in Austria, our researchers researched the Holocaust from the very beginning.

In this regard, I want to mention only one of our founders and long-time employees: Jonny Moser, born in 1925 in Parndorf, a small village in Burgenland at the Austrian-Hungarian border. His mother was Jewish, his father had adopted the Jewish faith. After the so-called Anschluss, the family fled to Hungary, lived illegally and was imprisoned in camps several times, but escaped the deportations to Auschwitz in 1944. In the summer of 1944, Jonny Moser met the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who, as we all know, was able to save thousands of Jews in Hungary by issuing them Swedish protective passports and accommodating them in “shelters”. As an employee of Wallenberg, Jonny Moser survived the Shoah in Hungary.

After the war, Moser returned to Austria and began studying history at the University of Vienna. He dedicated his dissertation to the taboo subject of anti-Semitism in Austria in 1962. In 1966, within the DÖW publication series of the Monographien zur Zeitgeschichte, he published the first Austrian study on the persecution of Jews in Austria. His estimate of more than 65,000 Austrian Holocaust victims was based on statistical calculations. They were empirically confirmed in an impressive manner more than 30 years later by the project I mentioned on registering the names of Shoah victims in Austria. After numerous other publications on the Nazi persecution of Jews, he published his memoirs in 2006 under the title “Wallenbergs Laufbursche. Memories of his youth 1938–1945”.

The DÖW was made up by many people like Jonny Moser, Holocaust survivors and researchers at the same time. Today we build on their work. While our collections are constantly growing, it is important to preserve our institution’s cultural heritage.

Digitization is a form of preservation. I am thus grateful for this collaboration between the USHMM and the DÖW, which will be of utmost importance for both of our institutions, I believe. For me personally this is a logical step and goes beyond a mere contract – having been a fellow at the USHMM twice and co-working with many friends at the USHMM, I know that the technical means and experiences of the Museum staff are unmatched worldwide. There could be no better partner for the DÖW.

Aware of the permanent problem of data protection laws in Europe, we will digitize valuable material of our archives. To give but some examples, we agreed to digitize (1) personal papers of Holocaust survivors and members of the resistance in Austria, (2) compensation files of a former law firm in Vienna that helped several victims obtain justice, and (3) oral history interviews with more than 1,000 survivors done in the 1980s, recorded on 2,800 cassettes, partly in very bad shape. They had been digitized in the early 2000s, but the digital files themselves are already outdated.

Thank you to all partners
– to the USHMM, as an institution, for not only having me as a fellow some time ago, a truly wonderful opportunity,
– to Zach and to Anatol for a long friendship, as well as many colleagues within the USHMM who are here now,
– to Joseph W. Moser, the son of Jonny Moser, who is here with us as well as
– to Eric Grube and Gerald Steinacher, who are not only experts on Austria and the Holocaust, but also part of our friendship association – the American Friends of the DÖW.
– And, not least, to the Austrian embassy for hosting us here today.

I hope and I know that this cooperation today will strengthen our ties between the US and Austrian historiography.

Fotos: Privat

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