Samuel Clowes Huneke, author of the award-winning States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany, uncovers stories about queer women during the Third Reich—their treatment in society and opportunities to resist.

In Nazi Germany, the medical field was part of the larger effort to dehumanize anyone who did not conform to the idea of a “healthy German nation.” Dr. Sabine Hildebrandt, who teaches the history of anatomy at Harvard Medical School, scrutinizes the biographies of medical professionals during the Nazi era and restores the histories of victims subjected to coercive medical experimentation both before and after death. Dr. Hildebrandt also considers the legacies of this history for the present, including how to ethically approach work with human remains in historical collections at universities, museums, and historical institutions.

Shown at Witness for the Future: Holocaust Memory in a Post-Survivor World at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin on May 6, 2024. 

Dr. Justyna Matkowska, postdoctoral researcher at the Adam Mickiewicz University of Poland and adjunct faculty at SUNY, will uncover the stories and struggles of the Roma and Sinti people during World War II, bringing new perspectives to this lesser-known aspect of Holocaust history and informing modern approaches to remembrance

Dr. Milovan Pisarri, research fellow at Belgrade University, lectures on the mechanisms that led to the Roma Genocide in southeastern Europe, the history of anti-Roma racism, and the reasons behind the general lack of interest in the topic.

Thursday, February 22, 2024 at 1:00 PM PT | 4:00 PM ET

Dr. Anna Hájková, pioneer of queer Holocaust history, will discuss why including queer narratives is crucial to developing a deeper understanding of Nazi persecution and societal resistance.

“Recovering Victims’ Voices,” a lecture series on marginalized victims of the Holocaust, highlights new and emerging scholarship on often un- or underexplored victims of Nazi persecution. The series shows how historical identity-based hate influences contemporary discourse about race, gender, sexuality, and disabilities.

Florian Zabransky seeks to excavate the particular intimate experience of male Jews, including how are queer relations narrated in the interviews.

Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor at Northwestern University Peter Hayes examines antisemitism and homophobia as central components of Nazi racism.

At the close of World War II, the Allies labeled survivors of the Holocaust as either displaced persons (DPs), refugees, or stateless persons. These categories included Jews, prisoners of war, Roma and Sinti, forced laborers, and perpetrators who used the chaos to hide their identity. But as the scale of the humanitarian disaster became more apparent, the Allies were forced to refine these designations. Christina Wirth, the USC Shoah Foundation's inaugural Robert J. Katz Fellow in Antisemitism Studies, explores postwar sorting processes and the roles officials and humanitarian organizations played in shaping these categories. She further examines how antisemitism contributed to the establishment of a "Jewish DP" subcategory.

“Being together with Dita - We did it together. [...] Neither of us would have survived without the other, and we both realize that.”⠀⠀ Margot Heuman was born in Hellenthal, Germany in 1929. In 1942, she and her family were sent to Theresienstadt ghetto, where Margot and her sister were put into a youth home. ⠀

In the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel, the USC Shoah Foundation and Tablet Studios announced a partnership to collect, archive, and make available testimonies of survivors, bereaved family members, and rescuers who risked their lives to save others during the assault.

Dr. Shira Klein is Associate Professor, Chair, Department of History at Wilkinson College at Chapman University. Dr. Klein focuses on Italian Jewry, Jewish migration, and the Holocaust. Her book, Italy’s Jews from Emancipation to Fascism (Cambridge University Press, 2018), was selected as finalist for the 2018 National Jewish Book Award. Her next book project will examine Italian Jews’ participation in Italy’s African empire from the 1890s to World War II, including their ties to indigenous Jews in Libya and Ethiopia.  

Dr. Anna Hájková, a scholar of Jewish Holocaust history and pioneer of queer Holocaust history, discusses why including queer perspectives helps us develop a more inclusive history of the Holocaust.

On January 23, 2002, Ruth Pearl dreamt that her son, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was scared and in trouble. In her dream, she told him she would bring him tea and take care of him. She woke up in a panic and sent an email to Daniel, who was on assignment in Karachi, Pakistan. “I said, ‘Danny, this is a dream that I had. Please humor me and answer this email immediately.’ He never did,” Ruth said in an interview with the USC Shoah Foundation in 2014.

Warren Rosenblum, Professor of History at Webster University, St. Louis, will discuss his research on the history of disability during both the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. He will further explore how Nazi conspiratorial theories about antisemitism and persons with disabilities are linked through fear of the “other."

Jaclyn Singer has a lifelong passion for Judaism, Israel and community-building. She holds a bachelor's degree in social science from San Diego State University and a master's in security and diplomacy from Tel Aviv University.

Rachel Herman is the Program Platforms Lead of the USC Shoah Foundation. In this role, Rachel manages IWitness, the Visual History Archive, SFI Access, Echoes & Reflections and the building of in-app and Virtual IWalks. Rachel joined the Institute in 2017, working as a content specialist with the Education team.

Sam Gustman has been chief technology officer (CTO) of the Shoah Foundation since 1994. Gustman is also associate dean and CTO at the USC Libraries where he oversees IT for the Libraries and started the USC Digital Repository.

The USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Dr. Abner Delman, a cardiologist and longtime supporter of the USC Shoah Foundation. He was 93. Abner's wife, Ilse-Lore Delman, was a Holocaust survivor who fled her hometown to escape Nazi persecution at a young age. She spent three years in hiding. In 1998, Ilse recorded her testimony with the USC Shoah Foundation, and soon after, the couple became involved with the organization.

Trained as a historian of modern Europe in USC’s History Department, Clark comes to the Shoah Foundation from MIT, where she has been the Faculty Director of MIT’s Programs in the Digital Humanities.

Jenna Leventhal is the Senior Director of Administration at USC Shoah Foundation. She earned a BA in history from UC Santa Barbara and an MA in public history from University of Houston, with an emphasis in Holocaust education and oral history.

Living Links, the first national organization created to engage and empower third-generation (3G) descendants of Holocaust survivors, has joined forces with the USC Shoah Foundation. The new partnership will expand a Living Links program that teaches 3Gs to share their family stories in classrooms and with community groups to counter antisemitism, bigotry and hate. At a time when the number of Holocaust survivors is dwindling and antisemitism is on the rise, 3Gs are uniquely positioned to offer personal accounts about how unchecked intolerance and hate led to the Holocaust.

The USC Shoah Foundation is proud to co-convene "Archives in/of Transit: Historical Perspectives from the 1930s to the Present," a closed, in-person workshop for scholars that will take place on June 28 and 29, 2024.

In commemoration of Pride Month, the Institute recognizes the LGBTQ+ people persecuted under the Nazis from as early as 1933 to the end of the war in 1945, some of whose stories are in the Institute’s Visual History Archive.They are stories of survival, resistance, rescue, and heartbreaking loss. Some of the witnesses were targeted by the Nazis for being gay under the German penal code, Paragraph 175. Other witnesses recall their encounters with gay men and women who provided rescue and aid at great risk to their own lives.

We mourn the passing of Dana Schwartz, 89, a Holocaust survivor and dedicated interviewer for the USC Shoah Foundation, who died on May 9 in Los Angeles. Dana, who later became a teacher and marriage and family therapist, was four when the Second World War started. She and her mother escaped the Lwów ghetto and survived in hiding.