Alfred Wiener was a German Jew, who dedicated much of his life to documenting antisemitism and racism in Germany and Europe, and uncovering crimes of Germany's Nazi government. He is best known as founder and long-time director of the Wiener Library

Wiener Library

The Wiener Library is the world's oldest institution devoted to the study of the Holocaust, its causes and legacies. Founded in 1933 as an information bureau that informed Jewish communities and governments worldwide about the persecution of the Jews under the Nazis, it was transformed into a...

.

Early life

Wiener trained as an Arabist and spent the years 1909 – 1911 in the Middle East. He fought in the First World War

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

, winning the Iron Cross

Iron Cross

The Iron Cross is a cross symbol typically in black with a white or silver outline that originated after 1219 when the Kingdom of Jerusalem granted the Teutonic Order the right to combine the Teutonic Black Cross placed above a silver Cross of Jerusalem....

 2nd Class. From 1919 he was a high-ranking official in the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens

Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens

The Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens was founded by German Jewish intellectuals on 26 March 1893 in Berlin, with the intention of opposing the rise of Anti-Semitism in the German Empire...

 (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, CV), and identified the Nazi Party as the chief danger to the Jews of Germany and to German society as a whole as early as 1925.

Anti-Nazi activities

In 1928 Wiener was instrumental in creating the Büro Wilhelmstrasse of the CV, which documented Nazi activities and issued anti-Nazi materials until 1933 when Hitler came to power. Wiener and his family fled to Amsterdam where he, together with Dr David Cohen of Amsterdam University, founded the Jewish Central Information Office

Wiener Library

The Wiener Library is the world's oldest institution devoted to the study of the Holocaust, its causes and legacies. Founded in 1933 as an information bureau that informed Jewish communities and governments worldwide about the persecution of the Jews under the Nazis, it was transformed into a...

 (JCIO). In 1939 he and the collection transferred to London.

Wiener spent most of the war years in the USA, collecting materials for the JCIO and working for the British and American governments. He returned in 1945 to transform the Information Office into a library and centre for the scholarly study of the Nazi era.

From the mid-1950s Wiener was semi-retired and travelled frequently to Germany to speak to groups of young people and establish contact with Christian groups.

Awards

In 1955 Wiener was awarded the highest civilian decoration of West Germany, the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit (Grosses Verdienstkreuz des Verdienstordens).

Personal life

Wiener's first wife, Margarethe, died shortly after being released from Bergen-Belsen

Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

Bergen-Belsen was a Nazi concentration camp in Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle...

 concentration camp on the way to Switzerland in 1945. In 1953 he married for a second time, to Lotte Philips.

Wiener become a naturalized Briton in the late 1940s.

Further reading

Ben Barkow

Ben Barkow

Ben Barkow is the director of the Wiener Library Institute of Contemporary History and writer.Barkow was born in Berlin but lived in London from the age of four. He studied at the Middlesex Polytechnic and at University College London...

: Alfred Wiener and the making of the Holocaust Library, London: Vallentine Mitchell 1997, ISBN 0-85303-328-5