War and Genocide in Europe, 1939-1945: Research Seminar

To search a library catalogue for primary sources, use some of these terms in addition to your search terms (e.g., ghetto AND holocaust):

• "personal narratives," sources, letters, correspondence, speeches, interviews

Searching the following two catalogues should find the majority of available sources.

• Omni - owned by academic libraries in Ontario (not UofT)
• Worldcat - owned by academic libraries in the world (including UofT)

Request an item from another library (Interlibrary Loan)

Bonus! The Internet Archive may have a digitized copy of a print book.

Catalogue records do not consistently apply subject headings, so an additional approach is to mine bibliographies of secondary sources, including theses and dissertations. For example:

Riegel, J. E. M. (2021). Catastrophe and continuity: Musical life in the warsaw ghetto (Order No. 28548098). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

Commercial

Laurier, UG, and UW have many commercial primary source collections, however none of them are helpful for the content of this course.

• i.e., if you Google and come across any of these Gale products, we do not have access.

not-for-profit 

Ways to search google ("primary sources", interview)

A selective list of freely available digital primary source collections. Note that many of these collections include content in its original language; and that there are commentaries, essays, and other text that is secondary.

• Fortunoff Video Archive
  • Includes testimonies of Holocaust survivors, witnesses and liberators. Registration required.
• Nuremberg Trials Project (Harvard)
  • Includes trial transcripts, briefs, document books, evidence files, and other papers from the trials of military and political leaders of Nazi Germany. See also the Avalon Project (Yale), which has OCR'd versions of many of the same texts.
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Collections Search
  • Repository of Holocaust evidence that documents the fate of victims, survivors, rescuers, liberators, and others. The collection contains documents, artifacts, photos, films, books, and testimonies.
• USC Shoah Foundation: Visual History Archive Online
  • Includes video testimonies of survivors and witnesses of multiple genocides. Requires registration.
• Voices of the Holocaust
  • Includes audio files and searchable transcripts of interviews conducted in 1946.
• Yad Vashem - The World Holocaust Remembrance Center
  • Includes sources from the Yad Vashem archives and Holocaust survivor testimonies, and photo and document archives.

Also:

• You can also emulate what you see in other publications.
• 14.160: Citations taken from secondary sources