Alfred Wiener (16 March 1885,

Potsdam Potsdam () is the capital and, with around 183,000 inhabitants, largest city of the German state of Brandenburg. It is part of the Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region. Potsdam sits on the River Havel, a tributary of the Elbe, downstream o ...

– 4 February 1964,

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

) was a German Jew who dedicated much of his life to documenting

antisemitism Antisemitism (also spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism) is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is considered to be a form of racism. Antis ...

and racism in Germany and Europe, and uncovering crimes of Germany's Nazi government. He is best remembered as the founder and long-time director of the

Wiener Library The Wiener Holocaust Library () is the world's oldest institution devoted to the study of the Holocaust, its causes and legacies. Founded in 1933 as an information bureau that informed Jewish communities and governments worldwide about the pe ...

Biography

Wiener trained as an Arabist and spent the years 1909 – 1911 in the Middle East. He fought in the

First World War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

, winning the

Iron Cross The Iron Cross (german: link=no, Eisernes Kreuz, , abbreviated EK) was a military decoration in the Kingdom of Prussia, and later in the German Empire (1871–1918) and Nazi Germany (1933–1945). King Frederick William III of Prussia es ...

2nd Class. From 1919, he was a high-ranking official in the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, CV), and identified the

Nazi Party The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported t ...

as the chief danger to the Jews of Germany and to German society as a whole as early as 1925. Wiener's first wife, Margarete, died shortly after being released from

Bergen-Belsen concentration camp Bergen-Belsen , or Belsen, was a Nazi concentration camp in what is today Lower Saxony in northern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. Originally established as a prisoner of war camp, in 1943, parts of it became a concentra ...

on the way to Switzerland in 1945. In 1953, he married Lotte Philips. Wiener became a naturalized British citizen in 1946.

Anti-Nazi activities

In 1928, Wiener was instrumental in creating the Büro Wilhelmstrasse of the CV, which documented Nazi activities and issued anti-Nazi materials until 1933 when Hitler came to power. Wiener and his family fled to Amsterdam where he, together with Dr. David Cohen of Amsterdam University, founded the Jewish Central Information Office (JCIO). In 1939 he and the collection transferred to London. Wiener spent most of the war years in the USA, collecting materials for the JCIO and working for the British and American governments. He returned in 1945 to transform the Information Office into a library and centre for the scholarly study of the Nazi era. From the mid-1950s, Wiener travelled frequently to Germany to speak to groups of young people and establish contact with Christian groups. Two of his pamphlets he originally published in German in Germany, ''Prelude to Pogroms? Facts for the Thoughtful'' (1919) and ''German Judaism in Political, Economic and Cultural Terms'' (1924), were published together in English translation as ''The Fatherland and the Jews'' in 2021.

Awards

In 1955, Wiener was awarded the highest civilian decoration of West Germany, the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit (Grosses Verdienstkreuz des Verdienstordens).

Biography

Anti-Nazi activities

Awards

References

Further reading