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Welcome to NIOD

NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies is a national and international centre of expertise for interdisciplinary research into the history of world wars, mass violence, and genocides, including their long-term social consequences. In addition, NIOD collects, preserves, and provides access to archives and collections.

Fascism. Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies

We proudly present volume 13, issue 1 (2024) of the Fascism journal (open access). We hope you’ll enjoy reading the ...

Highlighted publication

Excavating Sobibor

From 2000 to 2020, archaeologists conducted extensive research at the site of the former Nazi death camp Sobibor, mar...

Highlighted publication

Traces of Sobibor

No one was supposed to find Sobibor ever again. In 1943, when the Nazis shut down the death camp, they destroyed the ...

News

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31 October 2024

Watch: HGS annual lecture 2024

On 17 October 2024, prof. Martin Shaw delivered the annual Holocaust and Genocide Studies lecture in Amsterdam. The title of his lecture was 'In Defence of the Concept of Genocide’.

23 September 2024

New episode NIOD Rewind podcast

How has American tourism to Nazi concentration camps influenced the ways in which people remember the Holocaust and Nazi atrocities? In this episode, Anne van Mourik (NIOD) sits down with Leonie We...

08 August 2024

Development EHRI as a permanent facility enters final stage

Last month the Dutch government sent a formal request to the European Commission (EC) to set up the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) as a permanent facility, on behalf of all the c...

23 July 2024

NIOD Submission on Food Insecurity to UN Special Rapporteur

NIOD researchers Lucy Gaynor and Anne van Mourik recently published an article on food insecurity in response to a call for submissions from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Fo...

10 July 2024

Opening comic book exhibition ‘Picturing the Unimaginable’

Ten talented cartoonists from different backgrounds and ages from the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium created a story from their own perspective in the context of three former Nazi concentration c...

05 July 2024

New episode NIOD Rewind podcast

In recent years, several far-right parties espousing nationalist, anti-immigrant, and Eurosceptic ideas have garnered significant support. Despite their nationalist ideologies, these contemporary f...

02 July 2024

UvA commissions NIOD to investigate its colonial past

The University of Amsterdam (UvA) is set to investigate its own colonial and slavery history and has asked the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies to conduct the research. The p...

24 November 2023

Laurien Vastenhout receives 'Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research 2023'

Dr. Laurien Vastenhout will receive this award on 4 December for her book ‘Between Community and Collaboration: “Jewish Councils” in Western Europe under Nazi Occupation’ (Cambridge: University Pre...

20 October 2023

Public statement in reaction to the petition 'UvA Support for Palestine, End Occupation'

NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies follows the developments surrounding the war between Israel and Hamas closely and with great concern. The catastrophic violence touches us all...

15 February 2023

Research on the Dutch Railways during the Second World War

In the spring of 2023, the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies will launch a large-scale research study on the Dutch Railways (De Nederlandse Spoorwegen, NS) during the Second Wo...

17 June 2022

NIOD and NIMH research twenty years of Dutch deployment in Afghanistan

The study concerns the nature, scope, costs, time period and set objectives of the military, diplomatic and civilian deployment in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021, as well as the limitations, dilemma...

26 April 2022

NIOD researchers discover proof of Syrian massacre

What do you do as a researcher when you come across video footage of a massacre that nobody else has seen? When NIOD researcher Ugur Üngör and Annsar Shahhoud, a student of the NIOD Holocaust and G...

23 March 2022

Research Report: 'Book About Betrayal of Anne Frank Based on Assumptions and Lack of Historical Knowledge'

The claim that Jewish notary Arnold van den Bergh probably betrayed Anne Frank is based on assumptions and inadequate historical knowledge, says a team of historians, including NIOD researcher Laur...

Activities

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16 October 2024

Spotlight on Sudan

In 2019, a popular uprising ended 30 years of dictatorship. But protestors’ aspirations of democracy and a return to civilian rule were soon betrayed. The military hijacked the transitional governm...

11 October 2024

Public Workshop: Listening to Testimonies of Mass Atrocities

The workshop coincides with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between EHRI, which is headquartered at NIOD, and the USC Shoah Foundation. A great occasion for a public workshop devoted t...

16 September 2024

HGS Annual Lecture 2024: In Defence of the Concept of Genocide

Eighty years ago, as the final winter of the Second World War began, the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin introduced the idea of “genocide” to describe the deliberate destruction of population g...

Blog

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25 June 2024

Historical war experiences and the archivist’s voice in the digital age

How are personal letters and diaries used when studying people’s experiences in times of war? How does the digitisation of historical ‘egodocuments’ contribute to this, and what issues does this ra...

02 November 2023

Illiberal Memory Politics: Insights by Andrea Pető

On the annual Holocaust and Genocide Studies lecture, on Sept 14th 2023, Prof. Dr Habil. Andrea Pető DSc, Dr.h.c. (Central European University) presented her work titled “Illiberal Memory Politics ...

29 June 2023

Tiny creatures of great importance: how Emmanuel Speijer did entomological research in the concentration camps

For most people, a concentration camp would not be the obvious place to collect insects. For the Dutch Jew Emmanuel Speijer, though, building an entomological collection was a way to survive. While...

07 June 2023

Addressing Violence in and through Objects: workshop reflections about ‘Cultural Genocide’

How can we discuss colonial destruction, oppression and erasure of cultural heritage by studying surviving objects and collections in European heritage institutions? What potential do objects from ...

19 April 2023

Introduction: Wartime letters and the ‘Postbus NIOD’ campaign week

Since 2020, in the project ‘First-hand Accounts of War: War Letters (1935-1950) from NIOD Digitised', NIOD has been working to digitise the special collection of handwritten letters dating from the...

19 April 2023

‘Is God a person?’ The questions and choices that arise when transcribing wartime letters

In recent decades, more and more historical sources have been digitised. Digitising a text source not only involves scanning the text, but also making the text in the source machine-readable. These...

04 April 2023

Written, cherished, scanned: the many lives of a wartime letter

In 'First-Hand Accounts of War: War Letters (1935-1950) from NIOD digitised', the (paper) wartime letters in NIOD’s archives are being scanned and transcribed

29 March 2023

‘I see you are still alive’ - The Unopened Letter and the Digital War Letters Collection of the University of Luxembourg

The team members of the NIOD-project ‘First-Hand Accounts of War’ collaborate with partners in- and outside of the Netherlands. The Luxembourgish sibling project ‘WARLUX – War Experiences in Luxemb...

29 March 2023

Hidden treasure and papers strewn with cigar ash: on the archival documents that find their way to NIOD

During the ‘Postbus NIOD’ campaign week, we highlight the unique nature of historical war correspondence, and we appeal to the public to donate to NIOD any war letters they might have lying about i...

01 February 2023

Elites, Emotions, and Extremism: Insights with McDoom

In December, Dr. Omar Shahabudin McDoom from the London School of Economics gave the Annual Lecture on Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2022. Alexeï Delanghe, a student of the NIOD/University of Amst...

04 January 2023

Always Learning: Organising a Workshop on Holocaust and Second World War Comics

As a young researcher, you are always learning about your research topic, but you also develop your academic skills, Betsy Inlow writes. In this blog, Betsy, who was a 2022 NIOD Fund fellow, writes...

16 November 2022

'Was the Holocaust a unique event?' and other questions: lectures by Bob Moore and Dan Michman

In October, historians Bob Moore and Dan Michman each delivered lectures at NIOD. The lectures were organized by the Master's programme Holocaust and Genocide studies, run jointly by the University...

28 October 2022

Defying a potential disaster. How cartoonists fought Dutch National Socialism on the eve of the Second World War

The theme of History Month 2022 is ‘What a disaster!’; a familiar exclamation in times of war and crisis, expressing the shock and helplessness felt when a disaster occurs. But the fear that societ...

27 September 2022

Detachment and distance: The challenges of using online archives

Social science researchers in the field of genocide studies are often trusted with stories related to severe trauma and highly personal, difficult experiences. In this blog, NIOD fellow Anna Gopsil...

29 August 2022

Sexual Violence and the War in Ukraine

As war in Ukraine continues to unfold, disturbing reports of sexual violence and rape levelled at Russian soldiers by Ukrainian women and children have been reported by media across the globe. In t...

21 March 2022

The destruction of Kyiv, then and now?

In September 1941, part of Kyiv city centre was destroyed; not by the German occupying forces, but by the Russian Red Army. The latter remotely detonated mines that were hidden before German troops...

17 March 2022

A Workshop on War Letters (in the Digital Age)

Since the introduction of Transkribus, a platform for digitization and transcription of historical documents, several projects working with collections of handwritten personal correspondence from b...

03 March 2022

Perhaps Not a World War, But One That Should Concern Us All: The War in Ukraine From a Vietnamese Perspective

‘The war in Ukraine is not a world war, but it is interpreted throughout the world from the specific concerns of people in different places’, says Tam Ngo, fellow at the NIOD and the Max Planck Soc...

22 December 2021

An archive of sorrow

‘When I’ve made a few lists, I often go to the Names Monument – I live nearby – and lay a stone for the families whose belongings I’ve just transcribed.’ Thus said one of the volunteers for the ‘Pa...

17 December 2021

A comic-strip diary against a background of war

NIOD recently added a diary in the form of a comic strip to its collection: an almost cheerful, literally colourful diary entitled ‘The Humorist of Van Gekkum & Co.’ In August 1939, the author, Lie...

08 December 2021

Focusing on the Future. Evoking Memories of German Hunger

On 16 October 2021, the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Cologne posted a photo of the above Kollwitz’s drawing on its Instagram in honour of World Food Day, an initiative started in 1945 by the United Nat...

07 September 2021

Luck, wisdom and infrastructure. On an unexpected historical source and a helpful colleague.

Once in a while, you come across a source that makes your heart beat faster. A source that you hadn’t known existed, but you’d nevertheless always hoped to encounter one day. In principle, such sou...

01 March 2021

Apartheid, Amnesty, Amnesia

The majority of those responsible for atrocities committed under apartheid have never stood trial. In this blogpost Kylie Thomas, our Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the NIOD, writes abou...

Visit NIOD

NIOD's collection can be consulted in the reading room.

Opening hours reading room

Tue - Fri 09:00 - 17:30 h
Closed on Mondays

Address

Herengracht 380
1016 CJ Amsterdam

Plan your visit