Documents of Persecution

This collection originated as a documentation of the persecution and genocide of Jews in the Czech lands excluding the archival materials relating to the history of the Terezín ghetto, which forms a separate collection. The content of the collection comprises originals, copies and transcripts of official documents and personal estates, as well as prints, newspaper clippings, maps, memoirs and a small amount of non-written material. The Documents of Persecution collection is a source of information on Holocaust history of Bohemian and Moravia Jews, and to a lesser extent also Slovakian Jews. Due to the manner by which it was created, the Documents of Persecution collection is relatively inhomogeneous; its documents have varying value, are often fragmentary and thus lack the context of a broader classification unit. Yet the collection represents a valuable supplement to work with coherent archival fonds and collections from the period of the Holocaust. The first major file comprises laws and regulations that directly or indirectly concerned the Jews in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Some of them are original copies, but most of them are mimeographed or typewritten copies. Aside from complete files containing laws and regulations from a whole range of sources sorted according to the original lists, there are also chronologically sorted files broken down by issuer. Another file comprises documents relating to the Treuhandstelle, which administered property confiscated from Jews in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which was also sorted, catalogued and placed in storage. This division of the Jewish Religious Community in Prague was more of an independent institution and was established 13 October 1941 at the order of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration and was only formally subordinate to the Jewish Religious Community in Prague. Following small files of documents from the Reich ministry of economy and Reich labour services in the Protectorate is the file "Jewish Emigration", which contains fragments of documents concerning this issue – from the conference in Evian, through documents of the travel division of the Prague Jewish Religious Community, instructions for emigration, the activities of Hechalutz, various lists and reports, to writings related to child emigration transports. In the file "Anti-Jewish Measures" are official and private written documents related to anti-Jewish speeches and measures. The file "Central Office for Jewish Emigration" contains only a few individual documents. Also included in the collection are statistics and some small factual files and a highly diverse set of individual documents (some of them not related to Jews). These are followed by a larger and more complete file "Concentration Camps", which includes documents concerning concentration camps as a whole as well as documents concerning individual concentration camps and correspondence from concentration camps. An independent file is made up of documents concerning Slovakian Jews. Other separate factual units are personal estates of individuals, literary work and a large file of memoirs, along with post-war literary and academic work devoted to the period of the Holocaust by Bohemian and Moravian Jews. After the writings from the activities of the post-war documentation efforts are fragments of documents on the validity of marriages made in the Terezín ghetto and on war crimes and collaborators. The collection is closed out by a small file of non-written material (e.g. Jewish stars), various items and forms. Some of the aforementioned files were processed in more detail in the inventory appendix. These comprise the following units: list of concentration camps, correspondence from concentration camps, jails and ghettos, personal estates, literary work and memoirs. The data are sorted alphabetically by author, deceased person or location (concentration camp). In addition, for the memoirs an index of concentration camps that the witnesses mention in their recollections was made, as were a name, location and subject index. There is an inventory available in Czech, English and German for the Documents of Persecution collection, which is gradually added to. The Documents of Persecution collection is accessible in the archive of the Shoah History Department of the Jewish Museum in Prague. It has been completely digitised. On-line access is planned.