Alfred Wiener and the making of the Holocaust Library

Alfred Wiener and the Making of the Holocaust Library combines the biography of Alfred Wiener and the history of the distinguished library and research institution he founded. From 1919, when he joined Germany's largest Jewish civil rights organisation, Wiener worked against the rising tide of right-wing extremism. With the coming to power of Hitler in 1933 he fled with his family to Amsterdam. There he set up the Jewish Central Information Office, which collected, collated and disseminated detailed information about events in Nazi Germany on a scale matched by no other organisation anywhere in the world. Moving his collection to London in 1939, Wiener made his resources available to the British government, thus providing Britain with a range and depth of intelligence about the enemy which could have come from nowhere else. Known by British civil servants as 'Dr Wiener's Library', the Jewish Central Information Office adopted the name Wiener Library after the war when Wiener recast it as an academic institution. The book explores how, in the 1950s and 1960s the Library played a pioneering role in founding the serious academic study of the Nazi era and the Holocaust. The author traces the Library's financial plight during the 1970s and the remarkable revival of its fortunes in the 1980s.