The Potsdam-based Moses Mendelssohn Centre launched a digital portal featuring interviews with Jewish Holocaust survivors on 11 November 2026. The “Archive of Memory” was unveiled at the Representation of the State of Brandenburg to the Federation in Berlin . For the first time, selected personal testimonies are now available online to a wide audience.
The portal is based on a collection of 78 filmed interviews recorded between 1995 and 1997. Most of those interviewed at the time lived in Berlin and Brandenburg. The centre carried out the project with the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University . The collection of interviews and the new online offering are not one and the same: the centre says it is still considering whether more of the 78 interviews can be added to the portal.
The recordings document the life stories of people persecuted under Nazi rule. They include memories of discrimination and expulsion, as well as of the November pogroms of 1938. The portal’s launch was linked to commemorations of this violence against Jewish people.
The Moses Mendelssohn Centre oversaw the digital preparation of the material and is continuing to develop the archive. It is making the testimonies available in partnership with the Brandenburg State Agency for Civic Education. According to Brandenburg’s Ministry of Science, background information and educational materials accompany the interviews. The portal is intended for both interested members of the public and specialists.
Some of the material had already been used for educational work. The centre says that six sample interviews were initially made available to schools on video cassette, and later on DVD. The new offering therefore mainly changes how people can access them: the selected testimonies are no longer available only through editions for schools and other educational institutions.
The interviews are valuable for historical research and education in part because of their biographical approach. Personal accounts show how those persecuted experienced events and later recounted them. At the same time, these are memories recorded decades after the events. Interpreting them therefore remains a task for historical and political education and research.
At the launch, Brandenburg’s Secretary of State for Culture, Tobias Dünow, praised the personal testimonies of disenfranchisement and persecution as a legacy. The archive helps people engage with history and their responsibilities in the present. The state funds the Moses Mendelssohn Centre, an affiliated institute of the University of Potsdam. The institution researches, among other subjects, the history and culture of Judaism in Europe, as well as antisemitism.
Digitisation secures public access to selected interviews, but does not replace the decision on which further recordings can be published. The collection remains larger than the material selected for the portal so far.
Editor: Celestina Fuentes (Article created with AI assistance).