Stumme Bilder des Holocaust sichtbar machen

This article (“Making silent images of the Holocaust visible”) presents the institutional set-up and the main goals of the VHH project right after it received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. It focuses on the project’s efforts to link well-known film materials about the Holocaust shot by American and British cameramen with rather unknown film documents from the East created by Soviet troops. Thereby material will become visible that was not shot at the end, but during World War II and that was recorded at other sites of Nazi mass murder, not only inside concentration camps. Moreover, the article emphasizes the project’s aim to digitize these film materials according to the highest standards of digitization in order to prevent the loss of valuable image information and avoid any manipulation of the original material. The article also reflects on the project’s aim to counteract the common practice of using the images for illustrative purposes by contextualizing them with related materials such as photographs, written documents and interviews.