Norbert Wollheim’s Oral History Interviews
© United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
On two occasions, Norbert Wollheim participated in extensive interviews about his life story. In the period 1986–88, he was interviewed by New York filmmaker Nikolaus Creutzfeldt, and in 1991 he was interviewed by Linda Gordon Kuzmack for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), which opened in Washington, DC, two years later.
Creutzfeldt’s interview with Wollheim focuses on the prewar era, the family setting and social milieu in which Norbert Wollheim grew up, his activitities in the Jewish youth movement, and his involvement in the Kindertransporte. In equal detail, the deportations of the Wollheim family to Auschwitz and Norbert Wollheim’s imprisonment as a forced laborer for I.G. Farben in the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp were discussed. Relatively little time, by contrast, was devoted to the postwar era and the Wollheim suit. An edited transcript is available on this website, and the film material can be seen in the archives of the Fritz Bauer Institute.
The USHMM interview with Norbert Wollheim deals relatively uniformly with Wollheim’s life before the war, the period in the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp, and the immediate postwar era, hence also with the Wollheim lawsuit. Excerpts from this interview can be seen in the permanent exhibition of the USHMM in Washington, DC. The seven hours of material form the basis for the survivor interview with Norbert Wollheim that can be seen on this website. As the USHMM interview was conducted on two days, May 10 and 17, 1991, the (unedited) transcript is available in two parts.
(MN; transl. KL)