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The virtual human rights library brings together resources from multiple libraries and information services, both internal and external, to create an online hub dedicated to the study of human rights. This curation is unique in its interdisciplinary concerns and focuses on writings and research from social sciences, humanities, and law.

The virtual library is continually updated with the latest academic research in issue areas, as well as with relevant films, recorded conversations, and other forms of media.

Searchable Database

Click into the dropdowns to select the disciplines, keywords, and media type for your search, and then hit "Apply."

Brendan Karch "A Jewish 'Nature Preserve': League of Nations Minority Protections in Nazi Upper Silesia, 1933–1937" Central European History 46, no. 01 (2013)

Under the guarantee of the League of Nations, Jews in most of Upper Silesia— an area encompassing nearly 1.5 million residents and around 10,000 Jews in 1933—were subject to special minority protections that barred Nazi discrimination on the basis of...

Philip Nord After the Deportation: Memory Battles in Postwar France (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

A total of 160,000 people, a mix of résistants and Jews, were deported from France to camps in Central and Eastern Europe during the Second World War. In this compelling new study, Philip Nord addresses how the Deportation, as it...

Jonathan Steinberg All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust 1941-43 (Routledge, 2002)

German and Italian fascist armies in the Second World War treated the Jews quite differently. Jews who fell into the hands of the German army ended up in concentration camps; none of those taken by the Italians suffered the same...

Jürgen Matthäus Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor: Holocaust Testimony and Its Transformations (Oxford University Press, 2010)

Among sources on the Holocaust, survivor testimonies are the least replaceable and most complex, reflecting both the personality of the narrator and the conditions and perceptions prevailing at the time of narration. Scholars, despite their aim to challenge memory and...

Charlotte Delbo Auschwitz and After (Yale University Press, 2014)

Written by a member of the French resistance who became an important literary figure in postwar France, this moving memoir of life and death in Auschwitz and the postwar experiences of women survivors has become a key text for Holocaust...

W.G. Sebald Austerlitz (Modern Library, 2011)

 Austerlitz is the story of a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real...

Marion A. Kaplan Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 1999)

Between Dignity and Despair draws on the extraordinary memoirs, diaries, interviews, and letters of Jewish women and men to give us the first intimate portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany.
Kaplan tells the story of Jews in Germany not...

Anna Holian Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2011)

In May of 1945, there were more than eight million "displaced persons" (or DPs) in Germany---recently liberated foreign workers, concentration camp prisoners, and prisoners of war from all of Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as eastern Europeans who had fled west...

Timothy Snyder Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2012)

From the bestselling author of On Tyranny comes the definitive history of Hitler's and Stalin's wars against the civilians of Europe in World War II.

Americans call the Second World War The Good War. But before it even began, America's...

Sarah Lichtsztejn-Montard Chassez les papillons noirs: Récit d'une survivante des camps de la mort nazis (Le Manuscrit and Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, 2011)

For over 25 years, Sarah Lichtsztejn-Montard has tirelessly recounted what she endured during the Second World War, especially to young people. How she and her mother escaped from the Vél’ d’Hiv’ on the first night after the round-up on July...

Please Note:

While the Virtual Library is now live for use, we are still working to update its contents and improve its functionality.  

It is usable by all visitors, but the hyperlinks to materials listed are for UChicago community members with a CNet ID and password.  

Please direct feedback and suggestions to Kathleen Cavanaugh

For technical assistance, email pozenhumanrights @ uchicago.edu.

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