Act One: Getting it on Tape

Shoah Videos
If you have a high-speed connection, you can easily watch several videos right from the Shoah Foundation homepage. Click here to view "About the Foundation," "Testimonies" and "Trailers" (the video player is on the left side).
In approximately six years, from 1994 to 2000, the Shoah Foundation gathered nearly 52,000 videotaped testimonies from 56 countries and in 32 languages. A project of this scope could be a logistical nightmare. But, with the help of thousands of highly skilled and trained volunteers and employees, the mission was successfully accomplished. In order to understand the work that had to be done, let's first take a look at what exactly a visual history testimony is.

Each visual history testimony is a videotaped interview, lasting, on average, two and one-half hours in length, with either a Holocaust survivor or witness. When people think of the Holocaust and its victims, they mostly think of Jewish people. But there were many other people that were targeted for persecution by the Nazis. The visual history archive held at the Shoah Foundation includes testimony from many different survivors, including:

  • Homosexual survivors - These are persons who were persecuted by the Nazi regime based on their homosexuality or suspected homosexuality.

  • Jehovah's Witness survivors - These are persons who were persecuted by the Nazi regime based on their religious affiliation with the Jehovah's Witness faith.

  • Jewish survivors - These are persons who were persecuted by the Nazi regime based on their religious affiliation with Judaism.

  • Political prisoner survivors - These are persons who were persecuted by the Nazi regime based on their political convictions and/or expression of those convictions.

  • Sinti and Roma survivors - These are persons who were persecuted by the Nazi regime based on their affiliation with the Sinti and Roma cultural groups ("Gypsies").

  • Eugenics policy survivors - These are persons who were persecuted by the Nazi regime based on eugenics laws and policies -- in an attempt to maintain a "pure" German race, the Nazis sterilized and killed people with mental and physical disabilities.
In addition to survivor testimony, interviews were also conducted with:
  • rescuers
  • aid providers
  • liberators
  • liberation witnesses
  • participants in war crimes trials

U.N. Genocide Convention
Below are the first four articles of the "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide."

Article 1
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.

Article 2
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

Article 3
The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide
(d) Attempt to commit genocide
(e) Complicity in genocide

Article 4
Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.