The project was born out of a simple observation: to date, there is no exhaustive inventory of personal diaries from the Shoah. While working on these sources in our respective fields of specialisation – the Nazi siege of Leningrad and the Shoah in Eastern Galicia – we discovered that it is still impossible to truly assess the scale of this phenomenon: how many diaries were kept, or at least preserved? When, and by whom, were they written? How have they come down to us? Where can they be found? These fundamental questions remain only partly answered.

Although personal diaries have become essential sources for the historiography of the Shoah in recent decades, they have rarely been studied as a corpus in their own right – with a few exceptions. Moreover, they have almost never been analysed within a broad geographical, temporal, and material framework – no doubt due to the many linguistic and technical challenges that such a project entails.

Yet these diaries are among the earliest accounts of the Shoah and, as such, deserve sustained scholarly attention. This is why we co-founded the Holocaust Diaries Project (HDP): to provide a systematic study of these diaries. By ‘Shoah diaries’, we mean diaries kept by Jewish individuals in Nazi Germany (1933-1945), in Nazi-occupied Europe, or under the control of regimes allied to the Third Reich, during periods of persecution and genocide.

Objectives

Our project has four main objectives:

1. Identify Shoah diaries by exploring various archive centres, where these documents are often poorly catalogued.

2. Create an inventory of these diaries, centralising data related to them for the first time by cross-referencing information on:

• The diarist (e.g., biographical details). This information is sometimes very incomplete or even non-existent; the identity of the author is not always known.
• The content of the diary (the Shoah experience it documents).
• The trajectory of the diary, from its writing to its preservation. We are interested not only in its production but also in the conditions of transmission, conservation, and archiving, as well as its editorial history, where applicable.

Such an inventory would make it possible to:

• Centralise these sources, which are scattered across many archive centres worldwide and often under-exploited, bringing to light little-known collections.
• Evaluate the phenomenon of diaristic practice in the face of disaster.
• Develop a sociology of diarists – those individuals who felt the need to write about themselves when their survival was at stake.

3. Develop conceptual, methodological, pedagogical, and digital tools to understand these sources as a coherent corpus in their own right.
Two major tools are currently being developed:

• A database.
• A mapping system that will display the database information on an interactive map, providing synthesis and organisation, and facilitating the transition from individual analysis to a macro-historical perspective.

These tools will be made available to the international academic community, teachers, and archivists to enable them to locate diaries, access reliable data quickly, and make better use of these sources.

4. Analyse the diaries to document the Shoah based on a multiplicity of individual experiences as they were lived and written day by day. The unprecedented breadth of the corpus will allow us to highlight both the diversity and the convergence of these experiences.

A long-term project

The project has been designed in several stages to enable large-scale implementation. Our aim is ultimately to cover all the territories occupied by the Nazis and/or their allies, which will require several years of research.

Project schedule

• January 2023: First grant awarded by EHESS to develop the project.
• 2023-2024: Funding from the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah (Sarah Gruszka) for the inventory of newspapers at the Mémorial de la Shoah.
• Since 2023: Organisation of a research and teaching seminar on diary writing in times of mass violence, in collaboration with our colleague Judith Lyon-Caen.
• March 2024: Submission of an ANR-DFG project (Franco-German partnership between the IfZ – with Andrea Löw – and EHESS – with Judith Lyon-Caen), entitled H-DIARIES. Funding has been secured for a three-year research project starting in June 2025.
• September 2025: Organisation of a conference in Caen on civilian diaries from the two World Wars, with the aim of creating a network of French-speaking researchers working on these sources.
• Upcoming: Launch of an international research network, the Wartime Diaries Research Network.
• Future plans: We intend to further expand the scope of the project by including more archive centres, more countries, more languages, and consequently more diaries.