Dr Simpson mentioned the UCU leaving out Jews from a list of Holocaust victims as a “shocking indictment of where we’ve come to”, saying it could be construed as “indicative of a wider problem” about knowledge of the Holocaust.
He said he wants the library to reach beyond its walls and no longer be a “hidden treasure” only used by a small group of specialist researchers. In the past few years, the institution has begun digitising its collection – something Dr Simpson was involved with in his former role as head of digital – which has been viewed online by about two million people.
“The material we have is too important to sit locked away in a store,” he said.
The library was started by Alfred Wiener, who had an “acute understanding of the danger posed by Hitler”, and began documenting the rise of Nazism from the 1920s.
“It was already clear to Alfred Wiener that evidence was essential, gathering evidence of what the Nazis had done in order to bring them to account,” Dr Simpson says, adding that Wiener collected over 350 eyewitness accounts of Kristallnacht, forming one of the earliest accounts of the Nazi prelude to the Holocaust.
“A lot of these documents just have the power and immediacy of the moment, and that’s very characteristic of the collections that we hold here.
“Unlike any other major collection, this material was gathered at the time by people who were experiencing the horrors of the Nazi regime.”
As former director Ben Barkow steps down after 20 years to make way to his successor, Dr Simpson jokes that he feels “no pressure” about being only the fifth person in the library’s 80-year history to have the role.
Another thing they have been doing is helping British Jews use their records of the Holocaust to obtain German and Austrian passports. Asked why, Dr Simpson said: “I think there’s a variety of reasons, but I think that the clearest and most obvious is because of Brexit.
“There’s an anxiety – which I think is understandable – that in previous years, if people wanted to emigrate, that they would have options… there’s a sense that the situation in Britain politically is really unstable.
“And you have the depressing situation where antisemitism in public life has become overt again rather than hidden, and where one of the two mainstream parties is being investigated for institutional antisemitism.” He added that whereas in the past there had been “options” for British Jews, they were now having to do more to secure these options.
Dr Simpson admitted he was surprised at the speed at which the UK has arrived at a point where some British Jews “feel [they would be] safe in Germany”, despite the popularity of the far-right AfD party and the recent attack on a synagogue in Halle on Yom Kippur.
He said that the far-right had become emboldened and produced two copies of a German Holocaust revision magazine The Volunteer that has been published continuously since 1951. In 2012, it was edited anonymously, but a recent edition, from 2019, carries a name and image of the editor, Guido Kraus.
Asked how the library planned to combat the rising hate among adults and online, Dr Simpson admitted that “unfortunately, some we are never going to reach”, but that they want to “prevent them reaching others”.
What they do provide is that essential evidence that others can use to combat Holocaust denial and demonstrate its relevance today, he said.
Dr Simpson also produced an election poster for Hitler from 1933 in which the dictator promised to combat unemployment provided he was given the power to become “more independent” from “the parties that have led the people to the place that is today.”
Months later, Hitler disbanded all other political parties to rule Germany unchecked. “Democracy is fragile,” Dr Simpson said.
