DOKUMENTY ZBRODNI I MĘCZEŃSTWA – “Documents of Crimes and Suffering” (or: “Documentation of Crimes and Martyrdom”). Published by the Jewish Historical Committee of the Kraków District (Wojewódzka Żydowska Komisja Historyczna w Krakowie) – an early documentation of the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the German occupation of Poland, primarily against Jews and Poles. Edited by Michał M. Borwicz, Nella Rost, and Józef Wulf. Kraków, 1945 – first edition. A copy dedicated and signed by Holocaust survivor and Polish-Jewish historian Józef Wulf (one of the book’s editors; Wulf’s autograph is exceedingly rare, as he signed very few items). In Polish.
From one of the earliest collections of testimonies published by the Main Commission for the Investigation of Hitlerite Crimes in Poland (Główna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce) – a Polish institution established after the war, dedicated to the large-scale gathering of testimonies, documents, photographs, and legal evidence regarding war crimes committed on Polish soil. Its goal was to document the Holocaust in real time. This booklet includes harrowing testimonies of survivors from the concentration camps of Bergen-Belsen, Majdanek, Buchenwald, Dachau, Auschwitz, and others, offering detailed accounts of the process of Jewish extermination in the camps, the operation of gas chambers, and the unbearable torture endured by prisoners, including medical experiments performed on their bodies – with firsthand accounts from prisoners who either witnessed the experiments or were subjected to them themselves. It also documents the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the ghettos of Poland, including detailed accounts of Aktions, mass executions, and the first exposure of Nazi official documents, police collaborators, medical reports, and more. The booklet includes detailed surveys of specific regions and destroyed Jewish communities. “The goal of the institution collecting and publishing documentary materials is to present the truth – without embellishment, but plainly and unchanged – and to bring it to the light of our global era…”(from the introduction). Most of the testimonies in the book are difficult to read, as they describe in extensive and graphic detail the persecution of the Jews and the boundless cruelty of the Nazis. For the first time, the world was exposed to the atrocities carried out inside the death camps – despite the Nazis’ deliberate efforts to obscure and erase the evidence of their crimes.
Jewish historical commissions were established in 1944–1945 at the initiative of Holocaust survivors, scholars, Jewish activists, and intellectuals. Their purpose was to collect detailed testimonies from survivors, Nazi documents, photographs, and other evidence related to the history of the Jewish extermination. The testimonies they gathered in real time are considered among the most reliable and important, as they were recorded shortly after the events by witnesses who had personally experienced the atrocities.
Józef Wulf [1912–1974], a German Jew, Holocaust survivor, and one of the earliest and most prominent researchers of Nazism and the Holocaust. He was born in Chemnitz and raised in Kraków, where he began rabbinical studies at the Jewish university. After the occupation of Poland, he was imprisoned with his family in the Kraków Ghetto and joined the Jewish underground. When his activity was discovered, he was arrested and deported to Auschwitz, from which he also survived the Death March. His wife and son survived as well, but the rest of his family was murdered.
After the war, he remained in Poland and served from 1945 to 1947 as a member of the Central Jewish Historical Commission, which focused on documenting Nazi crimes. In 1947 he moved to Paris, and in 1952 he settled in Berlin, where he published numerous books on the Third Reich, including biographies of Heinrich Himmler and Martin Bormann.
In 1965, he proposed turning the Wannsee Villa – the site where the decision for the “Final Solution” was made – into a memorial and documentation center, but his proposal was rejected by the German government. His sense of helplessness in the face of German society’s indifference led him to take his own life in 1974 by jumping from the fifth-floor window of his apartment in Charlottenburg. In a letter to his son, he wrote: “I have published 18 books about the Third Reich, and they had no effect. One can document everything to death for the Germans. There is a democratic regime in Bonn. But the mass murderers walk free, live in their little houses, and grow flowers.” After his suicide, he was buried in Holon.
XV, 214, [7] pp. Very good condition.
