Holocaust Library and Research Center Has Hundreds of Rare Documents

The Holocaust Library and Research Center, celebrated its first anniversary last month. Max Garcia, the chairman of the Center, and a survivor of Auschwitz, said that in that year “our collection has grown to 2500 books and we have collected hundreds of documents from every country where Hitler’s madmen struck.”

He said that among these books and document are death certificates from Bergen-Belsen, handwritten in a notebook by a Hungarian doctor listing all Jews who died of “various diseases” in the camp during the winter of 1944 and the spring of 1945 and babies who were born in the camp; a black Book of Polish Jewish communities that have disappeared from the face of the earth, one of a handful of such books in existence; and a purchase order from a Berlin factory placed by a Nazi commandant for gas ovens described as “garbage disposal ovens,” complete with prices.

Lonny Darwin, co-chairman of the Center, said that among the rare books at the Center is a story about a little known concentration camp called Dora. “Thousands of victims of the Third Reich were used to dig an underground center for the production of 12 rockets in diminution range in the heart of Germany after Allied planes bombed Peenemuende out of business, ” she said. “Thousands upon thousands of people died of Dora and yet few people have heard of it.”

“We have to keep answering those books are articles that declare the Holocaust to have been a hoax. We have to give documented proof most the Holocaust was indeed a fact of history,” she added.

The Center also has on Oral History Division that interviews form member of the U.S. Armed Forces who actually helped to liberate concentration camps, as well as camp survivors living in the San Francisco area. In addition, the Center sponsors lectures dealing with the Holocaust.