Wannsee Conference - Wannsee House Holocaust Memorial

Wannsee House Holocaust Memorial

In 1965, historian Joseph Wulf tried to have the Wannsee House made into a Holocaust memorial and document centre. But the Senate of Berlin did not want Holocaust memorials and spurned Joseph Wulf. In his last letter to his son David, 2 August 1974, Wulf wrote, "I have published 18 books about the Third Reich and they have had no effect. You can document everything to death for the Germans. There is a democratic regime in Bonn. Yet the mass murderers walk around free, live in their little houses, and grow flowers." Deeply despondent over the death of his wife and the collapse of his plans for a document centre, Wulf committed suicide, age 61, by jumping from the fifth floor window of his Berlin apartment, Giesebrechtstraße 12, Charlottenburg. In 1992 the Wannsee House became a Holocaust memorial. The Joseph Wulf Bibliothek/Mediothek on the second floor holds thousands of books on Nazism, anti-Semitism, and the Jewish genocide, along with many videos, microfilm texts and original Nazi era documents. Wulf’s last letter is on display in Berlin’s Jewish Museum.

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