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De Dam, Amsterdam (1943)

Beeldbank WO2 – NIOD – Collectie A.L.C. Knook

Welcome to NIOD

NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies is a national and international centre of expertise for interdisciplinary research into the history of world wars, mass violence, and genocides, including their long-term social consequences. In addition, NIOD collects, preserves, and provides access to archives and collections.

Emotional Imprints of War

Historical research can be enhanced by methods and resources from various disciplines, ranging from psychology to com...

Highlighted project

Oorlog voor de Rechter (War in Court)

The Central Archive for Special Jurisdiction (Centraal Archief Bijzondere Rechtspleging, CABR), the largest war archi...

Conveying Difficult Pasts: Theory, History and Memory

How can we exhibit histories of war, occupation, dispossession, famine, violence and genocide? How do you bridge the ...

News

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04 May 2023

Save the date: ICMEMO International Museum Conference 2023

From November 1 to 5, 2023, ICMEMO's international museum conference will take place in Amsterdam. With the theme "Living with War," the conference will address the question of how museums deal wit...

22 February 2023

Creating the Dutch National Node for the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI)

The Netherlands holds a unique collection of records relating to the Holocaust and Second World War and there are many researchers that study the Holocaust. EHRI-NL is working towards the further i...

15 February 2023

Research on the Dutch Railways during the Second World War

In the spring of 2023, the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies will launch a large-scale research study on the Dutch Railways (De Nederlandse Spoorwegen, NS) during the Second Wo...

13 January 2023

Book Presentation and Symposium on February 2: Bridging the Narratives. Indonesian and Dutch Historians Re-examine the Indonesian Independence War

On February 2, 2023, two new books on the Indonesian Independence War were presented at Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden.

14 October 2022

NIOD Congratulates Memorial for the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize

The NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies wishes to express its heartfelt congratulations to Memorial for the Nobel Peace Prize 2022 in recognition of its decades of work to expose...

17 June 2022

NIOD and NIMH research twenty years of Dutch deployment in Afghanistan

The study concerns the nature, scope, costs, time period and set objectives of the military, diplomatic and civilian deployment in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021, as well as the limitations, dilemma...

26 April 2022

NIOD researchers discover proof of Syrian massacre

What do you do as a researcher when you come across video footage of a massacre that nobody else has seen? When NIOD researcher Ugur Üngör and Annsar Shahhoud, a student of the NIOD Holocaust and G...

04 April 2022

New opening hours reading room

As of April 4, 2022, it is no longer necessary to make a reservation for a visit to the reading room. From then on, new opening hours will also apply.

23 March 2022

Research Report: 'Book About Betrayal of Anne Frank Based on Assumptions and Lack of Historical Knowledge'

The claim that Jewish notary Arnold van den Bergh probably betrayed Anne Frank is based on assumptions and inadequate historical knowledge, says a team of historians, including NIOD researcher Laur...

28 January 2022

Help us find the stories 'Behind the Stars'

On the occasion of Holocaust Memorial Day 2022, the NIOD ImageLab is launching the project "Behind the Star". This new project focuses on photographs in which people are depicted wearing the Yellow...

14 October 2021

The Netherlands offers to host EHRI headquarters

The Netherlands offers to host and co-fund the headquarters of the permanent European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI). Dutch incumbent Minister of the Interior and Kingdom Relations Kajsa ...

19 May 2021

'The Westerbork film': Research, Restoration, Exhibition

On 19 May 2021, Kamp Westerbork Memorial Centre launched Gevangen in Beelden (‘Captured in images’), an exhibition about the Westerbork film made in 1944 by German-Jewish refugee and prisoner Rud...

Blog

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19 April 2023

Introduction: Wartime letters and the ‘Postbus NIOD’ campaign week

Since 2020, in the project ‘First-hand Accounts of War: War Letters (1935-1950) from NIOD Digitised', NIOD has been working to digitise the special collection of handwritten letters dating from the...

19 April 2023

‘Is God a person?’ The questions and choices that arise when transcribing wartime letters

In recent decades, more and more historical sources have been digitised. Digitising a text source not only involves scanning the text, but also making the text in the source machine-readable. These...

04 April 2023

Written, cherished, scanned: the many lives of a wartime letter

In 'First-Hand Accounts of War: War Letters (1935-1950) from NIOD digitised', the (paper) wartime letters in NIOD’s archives are being scanned and transcribed

29 March 2023

‘I see you are still alive’ - The Unopened Letter and the Digital War Letters Collection of the University of Luxembourg

The team members of the NIOD-project ‘First-Hand Accounts of War’ collaborate with partners in- and outside of the Netherlands. The Luxembourgish sibling project ‘WARLUX – War Experiences in Luxemb...

29 March 2023

Hidden treasure and papers strewn with cigar ash: on the archival documents that find their way to NIOD

During the ‘Postbus NIOD’ campaign week, we highlight the unique nature of historical war correspondence, and we appeal to the public to donate to NIOD any war letters they might have lying about i...

01 February 2023

Elites, Emotions, and Extremism: Insights with McDoom

In December, Dr. Omar Shahabudin McDoom from the London School of Economics gave the Annual Lecture on Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2022. Alexeï Delanghe, a student of the NIOD/University of Amst...

04 January 2023

Always Learning: Organising a Workshop on Holocaust and Second World War Comics

As a young researcher, you are always learning about your research topic, but you also develop your academic skills, Betsy Inlow writes. In this blog, Betsy, who was a 2022 NIOD Fund fellow, writes...

16 November 2022

'Was the Holocaust a unique event?' and other questions: lectures by Bob Moore and Dan Michman

In October, historians Bob Moore and Dan Michman each delivered lectures at NIOD. The lectures were organized by the Master's programme Holocaust and Genocide studies, run jointly by the University...

28 October 2022

Defying a potential disaster. How cartoonists fought Dutch National Socialism on the eve of the Second World War

The theme of History Month 2022 is ‘What a disaster!’; a familiar exclamation in times of war and crisis, expressing the shock and helplessness felt when a disaster occurs. But the fear that societ...

27 September 2022

Detachment and distance: The challenges of using online archives

Social science researchers in the field of genocide studies are often trusted with stories related to severe trauma and highly personal, difficult experiences. In this blog, NIOD fellow Anna Gopsil...

29 August 2022

Sexual Violence and the War in Ukraine

As war in Ukraine continues to unfold, disturbing reports of sexual violence and rape levelled at Russian soldiers by Ukrainian women and children have been reported by media across the globe. In t...

21 March 2022

The destruction of Kyiv, then and now?

In September 1941, part of Kyiv city centre was destroyed; not by the German occupying forces, but by the Russian Red Army. The latter remotely detonated mines that were hidden before German troops...

17 March 2022

A Workshop on War Letters (in the Digital Age)

Since the introduction of Transkribus, a platform for digitization and transcription of historical documents, several projects working with collections of handwritten personal correspondence from b...

03 March 2022

Perhaps Not a World War, But One That Should Concern Us All: The War in Ukraine From a Vietnamese Perspective

‘The war in Ukraine is not a world war, but it is interpreted throughout the world from the specific concerns of people in different places’, says Tam Ngo, fellow at the NIOD and the Max Planck Soc...

22 December 2021

An archive of sorrow

‘When I’ve made a few lists, I often go to the Names Monument – I live nearby – and lay a stone for the families whose belongings I’ve just transcribed.’ Thus said one of the volunteers for the ‘Pa...

17 December 2021

A comic-strip diary against a background of war

NIOD recently added a diary in the form of a comic strip to its collection: an almost cheerful, literally colourful diary entitled ‘The Humorist of Van Gekkum & Co.’ In August 1939, the author, Lie...

08 December 2021

Focusing on the Future. Evoking Memories of German Hunger

On 16 October 2021, the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Cologne posted a photo of the above Kollwitz’s drawing on its Instagram in honour of World Food Day, an initiative started in 1945 by the United Nat...

07 September 2021

Luck, wisdom and infrastructure. On an unexpected historical source and a helpful colleague.

Once in a while, you come across a source that makes your heart beat faster. A source that you hadn’t known existed, but you’d nevertheless always hoped to encounter one day. In principle, such sou...

01 March 2021

Apartheid, Amnesty, Amnesia

The majority of those responsible for atrocities committed under apartheid have never stood trial. In this blogpost Kylie Thomas, our Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the NIOD, writes abou...

Visit NIOD

NIOD's collection can be consulted in the reading room.

Opening hours reading room

Tue - Fri 09:00 - 17:30 h
Closed on Mondays

Address

Herengracht 380
1016 CJ Amsterdam

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