Documentation and collections

In addition to contemporary printed resources and current secondary literature, which form the core of the library, a high number of other historical sources such as photographs, photo albums and scrapbooks, posters, museum artefacts, personal documents, diaries, letters and other archive and collection items provide the visitor with insight into the time of National Socialism. The witness reports, which are available on audio or video tapes or in written form, are of particular importance. These resources are collected in the documentation area in a database system called FAUST and made available for use by means of content categorisation. They can be accessed in the library’s reading room.

The collection is growing permanently thanks to donations, permanent loans and the reproduction of photographs and documents of private donors. Contacts to witnesses or their descendants, who donate materials to the NS Documentation Centre, are established for example by means of visitors programmes for former Jewish citizens of Cologne and former forced labourers, concentration camp prisoners and prisoners of war, by means of interview projects such as the video project ‘Erlebte Geschichte’ or calls for material donations for exhibitions such as on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the end of the war ‘Zwischen den Fronten’ (Between the frontlines) or ‘Kinderlandverschickung’ (Sending children to rural areas). Sometimes these donations consist of only one single document or a number of documents or these can be comprehensive estates such as that of the Catholic labour leader and resistance fighter Nikolaus Gross, to whom an entire finding aid is dedicated.

By way of example, part of the collection ‘Jüdisches Leben in Köln’ (Jewish life in Cologne) is described in more detail in order to illustrate the importance and validity of this collection. These holdings comprise materials from the late 19th century to the present and focus on the years 1900– 1945, consisting of 300 small and 30 large estates of persons from Jewish families with some 4,000 photographs and a large number of original documents. Part of this is the Collection ‘Irene and Dieter Corbach’, which fills 18 metres of shelves with original documents, photographs, witness reports, interviews as well as publications and comprehensive correspondence. The diverse materials, including official documents, letters, photographs, statutes, annual reports and much more containing information on persons, families, institutions and businesses in Cologne, were made available to the NS Documentation Centre by emigrants and survivors or their descendants from all over the world. This is the only type of material to be preserved in this part of the collection.

The files of the Cologne Gestapo or other NS organi - sations in Cologne were almost entirely destroyed by bombs and the systematic destruction of files at the end of the war in addition, many important activities were not only documented in files at a local level; for these reasons the work of the NS Documentation Centre is also based on records in other archives in Germany and abroad, which are assessed in accordance to their relevance to Cologne research projects. Factual databases on persons, organisations, institutions, events and Cologne topography as well as on individual topics, which are the second pillar of the documentation area in addition to the collection, were built up during the evaluation of the Centre’s own and external sources.

178,594 sets of data were listed in the database system FAUST at the end of 2012. A list of the collection and evaluation databases and the current figures on their listings and a short content description can be found in the annual reports of the NS Documentation Centre, which are available on the Internet.