Professor Pickhan is a professor at the Free University of Berlin (Freie Universität); Alina Bothe, PhD, is a research associate at the Center of Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg.  

Both are longtime users of the Visual History Archive; Pickhan was one of the first professors at Freie Universität (FU) to incorporate testimony after FU became the first full access site in Europe in 2006. Bothe earned her Ph.D. by writing about how the Visual History Archive and other forms of digitization shape the way we research, write and perceive the history of the Holocaust. At USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, they expanded a graduate seminar course called “Expelled! Researching the Deportation of Polish Jews from Berlin in 1938.” The course now uses the Visual History Archive to research the fates of specific families who were affected by the Berlin Polenaktion, three days in which 1,500 to 6,000 people of Polish descent were forcefully expelled from Berlin to Poland, foreshadowing the Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews a month later. Bothe also gave a public lecture that explored how users experience and relate to the testimonies in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive.