Since its premiere, Shoah has had a profound effect on how the Holocaust is perceived and remembered. The documentary has a runtime of 9 hours and 26 minutes and focuses largely on video interviews with survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators. The Jewish Museum Berlin’s latest exhibition, “Claude Lanzmann: The Recordings,” supported by the German Federal Foreign Office and the Alfred Landecker Foundation, provides insight into the many years of preparation that went into shooting the film.

Before filming for Shoah began, Lanzmann and his assistants, Corinna Coulmas and Irena Steinfeldt-Levy, conducted numerous preliminary interviews. These conversations, largely carried out in the 1970s, were recorded on cassette tapes and donated to the Jewish Museum Berlin by the Association Claude et Felix Lanzmann in 2021. They have since been digitized and transcribed by the museum. Now available to the public in the form of the Lanzmann Collection, this archive consists of roughly 220 hours of audio recordings in eight languages. These holdings, together with the film Shoah, were added to the UNESCO Memory of the World International Register, a list of the world’s documentary heritage with outstanding global significance, in 2023.

The Lanzmann Collection will be available online via the Oral-History.Digital platform from November 28, 2025. The collection is part of an ongoing editorial project. The first twenty-six interviews of the collection are already available online. By the end of 2027, all recordings in the collection will be fully accessible.

A Unique Auditory Experience

Visitors to the “Claude Lanzmann: The Recordings” exhibition can interact with around ninety minutes of audio material. Headphones provide a unique auditory experience, allowing visitors to explore the various topics of the exhibition through sound. For example, visitors can listen to recordings where Claude Lanzmann explains his film project and responds to questions regarding his methods and motivation, as well as the psychological and financial challenges involved. There is also an opportunity to listen to previously unheard voices – people whom Lanzmann could not convince to participate in the filming. This is followed by a section that features interviews with perpetrators of the Holocaust and examines how they became tangled up in their justifications and attempts to exonerate themselves. A fourth section of the exhibition is dedicated to the Shoah in Lithuania. While intensively researched by Lanzmann at the beginning of his preparations, this material is virtually absent from the finished film. By including it in the exhibition, visitors get a sense of the vast amount of research that was carried out as part of the project. Another section of the exhibition deals with Lanzmann’s first trip to Poland, where he went to Auschwitz and conducted several interviews with eyewitnesses. The last section of the exhibition compares the video footage featured in the final version of Shoah with the extensive raw material that was ultimately cut.

Research Partnership in Berlin

The Oral-History.Digital project is managed by the Digital Interview Collections team at the University Library of Freie Universität Berlin. They have supported and advised the Jewish Museum Berlin throughout the creation of the Lanzmann Collection and will continue to do so as it develops further. The museum’s research collaboration with Oral-History.Digital ensures that these digitized interviews can be made permanently available to all in accordance with the F.A.I.R. principles, i.e., they are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable as audiovisual research data. Tablets integrated throughout the exhibition provide visitors with full access to the collection through the Oral-History.Digital platform. The platform allows users to search the holdings using filters and full-text searches. Creating an account enables users to access even more features, for example, the ability to view sources and transcripts, create citations, and annotate material.

The Oral-History.Digital Platform

Funded by the German Research Foundation, the Oral-History.Digital platform at Freie Universität Berlin is a platform for audio or video interviews with witnesses to different historical periods. Museums, universities, and foundations are able to upload their audio and video interviews to the platform with transcripts and accompanying material, making them more widely available for education and research purposes. Researchers can browse the interview collections using filters or full-text searches, watch them with subtitles, annotate them, and create citations. To date, Oral-History.Digital comprises around 4,500 interviews from more than 200 separate collections, including the “Forced Labor 1939–1945” and “Erlebte Geschichte” (Lived History) interview archives from Freie Universität Berlin, the “Deutsches Gedächtnis” (German Memory) archive of the FernUniversität in Hagen, and the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial archive. Approximately fifty institutions currently make use of the platform.