Nationality German Occupation Historian | Known for Wannsee House Memorial Name Joseph Wulf | |
 | ||
Born December 22, 1912 Chemnitz Died October 10, 1974, Berlin, Germany | ||
Joseph Wulf (22 December 1912 – 10 October 1974) was a German-Polish-Jewish historian and Holocaust survivor.
Contents
Early life
Born in Chemnitz, the child of a Jewish family, Wulf was educated in Krakow. At the Jewish university there he was trained as a Rabbi. After the German occupation of Poland in the Second World War the Wulf family was deported to the Krakow Ghetto. There Wulf joined a Jewish group of resistance fighters. He was captured and imprisoned in Auschwitz Concentration Camp, and he survived after fleeing one of the notorious death marches. His wife and son survived the war, but he lost his father, mother, brother, sister-in-law, and niece.
Postwar historian
At war's end Wulf remained in Poland, and was from 1945 to 1947 executive member of the Central Jewish Historical Commission. In the summer of 1947 he moved to Paris and worked for the Centre pour l'Histoire des Juifs Polonais. In 1952 Wulf moved to Berlin. Wulf published many books about the Third Reich, among them biographies of Heinrich Himmler and Martin Bormann.
Wulf was honored with the Leo Baeck Prize (1961), the Carl von Ossietzky Medal (1964), and an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Berlin.
Wannsee Memorial
In 1965, Wulf proposed that the Wannsee House, the site of the Wannsee Conference in 1942, should be made into a Holocaust memorial and document centre, but the German government was not interested at that time. The building was in use as a school, and funding was not available.
Despondent, Wulf committed suicide in 1974 by jumping from the fifth floor window of his apartment at Giesebrechtstraße 12 in Charlottenburg. In his last letter to his son David, he wrote, "I have published 18 books about the Third Reich and they have had no effect. You can document everything to death for the Germans. There is a democratic regime in Bonn. Yet the mass murderers walk around free, live in their little houses, and grow flowers." Wulf is buried in Holon on the central coast of Israel, south of Tel Aviv.
On 20 January 1992, on the fiftieth anniversary of the conference, the site was finally opened as a Holocaust memorial and museum. In the dining room where the conference was held, photographs and biographies of the participants hang on the wall. The museum also hosts permanent exhibits of texts and photographs that document events of the Holocaust and its planning. The Joseph Wulf Bibliothek/Mediothek on the second floor houses a large collection of books on the Nazi era, plus other materials such as microfilms and original Nazi documents.