https://susanneberger.substack.com/p/the-raoul-wallenberg-research-initiative Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel • Former Nazi war crimes prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz dies at 103 • Alex Kershaw - One Day in April: The Liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Ohrdruf • Edward Elgar Publishing - Handbook of Genocide Studies • Haaretz - Erasing Raoul Wallenberg • Russian Memorial Society’s offices raided in Moscow • Documenting Raoul Wallenberg’s humanitarian mission to Hungary • Tel Aviv University to assist in the creation of official video appeal about Raoul Wallenberg • Swedish Academy conference Thought and Truth under Pressure #DemocracyinDanger • Inkstick Media - The Growing Pains of the Global Magnitsky Act • Meduza - A Dissident from a Book: Profile of Putin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza • Verstka - Judge in Kara-Murza trial appealed US Magnitsky sanctions listing • The Wall Street Journal - ‘You are completely alone’: Inside Russia’s Infamous Lefortovo Prison • Who is Evan Gershkovich? • Berliner Zeitung - Official documents are not private souvenirs: The legal dispute over the records of former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl

Raoul Wallenberg's 110th Birthday ++ "A High Degree of Confidentiality Would Result in Increased Openness"-New insights from the Raoul Wallenberg case file in the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs ++ Sweden's Holocaust Museum inaugurated with no planned exhibition space for Raoul Wallenberg ++ A seminal German court decision on freedom of information ++ A comprehensive history of Sweden's wartime C-Bureau ++ www.rwi-70.de The only known moving images of Raoul Wallenberg © SVT, Kulturnyheterna, Sweden August 4 th marks the 110 th birthday of Raoul Wallenberg. Happy Birthday to a remarkable man whose important legacy of compassion, activism and exceptional courage continues to grow and become ever more poignant. In one of the darkest moments of history, Wallenberg represented the one thing the world needed most-hope for the future. It is a good moment to tell him and other human rights defenders, past and present, a heartfelt Thank You for standing up against the powers of evil when nobody else dares to.

++ Virtual Event – January 17 ++ Raoul Wallenberg’s Legacy Today, and for the Next Generation ++ An interactive exhibit about the legendary German Attorney General Fritz Bauer ++ The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes to Premiere in North America at Illinois Holocaust Museum ++ Alexey Navalny’s prison hell ++ The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and the search for missing documents in Sweden and Hungary ++ Student volunteers wanted for creation of “Missing Person” Appeal ++

July 2015 marks the 71st anniversary of Raoul Wallenberg's humanitarian mission to Hungary. Over time, Wallenberg has come to personify the importance of individual action and individual rights, first as a rescuer in Budapest and later, as a victim of Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union. While Raoul Wallenberg’s humanitarian achievements are widely recognized, his importance as a victim is much harder to define. In this article, the authors argue that the insistence on historic truth about one man is ground zero for the concept of universal values and a democratic society. (First published in Judisk Krönika 01-09-2007)

Was one of Sweden’s top diplomats a Soviet asset? Why we need to know the truth about Sverker Åstrőm ++ Raoul Wallenberg’s family requests documentation from Russian archives ++ New Insights from the Raoul Wallenberg case file, Part III: The Swedish Foreign Ministry cannot account for various key memoranda from 2012 ++ Ambassador Hans Magnusson and Dr. Vadim Birstein discuss the interviews with former MGB employees from the 1990s ++ The troubling fallout from the Swedish elections ++ A disappointing report by the official Swedish government commission regarding Dawit Isaak and Gui Minhai ++ A Swedish radio documentary about Raoul Wallenberg ++ The Raoul Wallenberg symposium in Santa Fe ++ Launch of the Raoul Wallenberg Center, a new digital museum ++ A new book chronicles the long lasting effects of an unsolved disappearance during the Cold War ++ Marvin Makinen and Trevor Reed on the brutal conditions Brittney Griner will face in a Russian penal colony ++

Between 1939 and 1945, the Germans and their helpers murdered six million Jews throughout Europe. The Holocaust was aimed at the extermination of people, as well as at the destruction of their culture and the veiling of all traces of these crimes. Jewish researchers attempted to counteract this complete “eradication” even as the murders were being committed. They documented this event by gathering sources to visualize and remember the scale of the crimes and the extermination of Jewish life. In exile, as well as in life threatening conditions in the ghettos and camps, they carried out research, collected facts and preserved evidence of the crimes. They founded archives and committees that continued their work after the end of the war. They wanted to document who was murdered and to identify the killers. They wanted to remember the dead, to fathom the crimes, to bring the perpetrators to justice and, at the same time, they wanted to make future genocides impossible. Driven by varying motives, these women and men from a variety of professional backgrounds dedicated themselves to the research and the commemoration of the Holocaust. They thereby denied the criminals their final triumph: the murder of millions did not fall into oblivion and did not go without consequence. Books, memorial sites, research institutes, trials and, last but not least, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Genocide Convention of 1948 were results of their passionate dedication. Our contemporary knowledge of the Holocaust and the basis of our remembrance of the Holocaust are based on this legacy.

Jan Karski, a courier for the Polish government in exile, secretly entered the Warsaw ghetto and transit camp Izbica to observe the suffering there. Making a careful record of his visit, he traveled the world to tell its leaders what he had witnessed. Karski is one of the most significant witnesses of the Holocaust, whose experiences have been documented innumerable times. To date, however, no comparative study exists of Karski’s interviews. To what extent do Karski’s versions of his heroic story differ? Does it matter? What does this case teach us about Holocaust ‘celebrity witnessing’? In this article, we trace shifts in a well-known Holocaust narrative to illustrate how even a very well-established story, divided into three well-established smaller stories, changes significantly depending on the archiving institution that collects the account and the interviewers who conduct each interview. Our investigation demonstrates the effects of the archive on oral testimony and narrative history. These effects are always part of the oral testimony setting, but in the case of well-known interviewees such as Karski, who have testified a number of times in different contexts, they are especially evident. Conducted over a seventeen-year period in very different institutional and generic settings, Karski’s testimonies illustrate both internal heterogeneity, integral to his own development as a person, an intellectual, and a witness, and ‘external’ heterogeneity, shaped by the interviewing institution and the interviewer’s methodology. We study the production of Karski’s interviews from ‘the contact zone’ of Holocaust testimony to identify how the details of his story shift in relation to his listener. Although it has been suggested that Karski’s ‘performances’ become more wooden over time, we find the opposite: that he becomes more animated, sure of himself, and, by the time of his last interview, ready to fully inhabit the role of the ‘celebrity witness.’