• Our History
  • Our Impact
  • Most Watched Testimonies
  • Top News

30 Years of Preserving History


  • Director Steven Spielberg founded Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1994 to videotape and preserve interviews with Holocaust survivors.
  • By 2001, we had collected 52,000 testimonies. Our Visual History Archive now contains almost 57,000 searchable testimonies, the largest such collection in the world.
  • We started digitizing our collection in 2008 and we constantly update our preservation systems. We hold 12 patents on digital collection management technologies that we developed.
  • In 2024, users viewed 138 million minutes of testimony on YouTube. 

Location


Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

In January 2006, the Shoah Foundation moved from Universal Studios to the USC campus in Los Angeles, joining the vibrant and engaged community of faculty, researchers, and students. In 2023, we opened offices at USC’s Washington, D.C., campus.

Expanding Research Horizons


Researchers, students, journalists, policymakers, storytellers, and the public turn to our Archive to enrich and expand their understanding of history. With its wealth of testimonies, tools, and resources, the Archive is vital for deepening knowledge and fostering meaningful insights.

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Our 30-Year Impact


208
Archive Access Sites
7,000
Scholary Citations
407,000
Educators
27 Million
Students
47 Million
YouTube Views

Our Partners


Viewers around the world watched 138 million minutes of testimony on YouTube in 2024. Explore some of the interviews they found most compelling.

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Top News Stories


Archival Ingenuity Saves Mold-Ridden Testimonies from Oblivion


Alan Auyeung pulled on a pair of latex gloves and a N95 face mask. For good measure, he placed a pair of protective goggles over his eyes too. A trip to the supermarket? In these Covid-19 times, it could have been but, in fact, Auyeung was preparing for a task of quite a different nature: saving the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, whose eye witness accounts of Nazi atrocities were at risk of being eaten away by mold. Read More

USC Shoah Foundation redoubles efforts to collect testimonies of Holocaust survivors before it is too late


Miriam Katin survived the Holocaust as a toddler because her quick-thinking mother faked their deaths in Budapest at a historically perilous time for Jews in Hungary. Now 77, Katin has a thriving career as a graphic artist whose humor cartoons have appeared in The New Yorker. Her remarkable oral history would have been lost to time without the initiative by USC Shoah Foundation to document the stories of Holocaust survivors before it is too late. Read More

USC Shoah Foundation Adds Large Collection of Armenian Genocide Testimony to its Archive


The more than 1,000 interviews will constitute the largest non-Holocaust-related collection to be integrated into the Institute’s Visual History Archive. It will also be the Archive’s first audio-only collection. Read More

USC Shoah Foundation Establishes Visual History Archive “Mirror Sites” Around the World


USC Shoah Foundation has established four “mirror sites” for the Visual History Archive, guaranteeing that a fully-functional Visual History Archive will exist in perpetuity outside its home at the University of Southern California. Read More

USC Shoah Foundation Institute Begins Massive, State of the Art Preservation Effort to Save One of World’s Largest Video Archive


The preservation of one of the largest digital video archives in the world got underway this fall at the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, where staff began converting more than 100,000 hours of videotaped Holocaust testimonials to a new digital format.The Foundation, originally established by filmmaker and USC Trustee Steven Spielberg, moved to the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences in 2006.  Spielberg was motivated to a great extent by a desire to guarantee the survival of the project he started. Read More

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Makes USC Shoah Foundation Institute's Holocaust Survivor and Witness Testimonies Available


The world’s largest collection of visual Holocaust survivor and witness testimonies is now available to United States Holocaust Memorial Museum visitors. The University of Southern California (USC) Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive contains nearly 52,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses from 56 nations and in 32 languages. Read More

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