Strengths of the Collection

Holocaust denial: Because of Mazal’s passion for documenting and combatting Holocaust denial, and because of legal systems in the United States that allow such material to circulate, CU’s collection is one of the largest in the world dedicated to Holocaust denial. These materials are restricted in many other countries, including Germany. An example of this genre is Dissecting the Holocaust: the Growing Critique of "Truth" and "Memory.” The author, Germar Rudolf, served time in a German prison for Holocaust denial.

Memoirs of Holocaust survivors: CU holds hundreds of memoirs and collections of testimonials by Holocaust survivors, including many rare self-published volumes, and books by or about survivors from less well-known Jewish communities, including the story of Heinz Kounio, a Greek survivor from Salonika. 

Memorial books (yizker bikher): Harry Mazal collected a wide range of memorial books (called yizker bikher in Yiddish) that show how postwar Jewish communities commemorated their communities in a core ritual of Jewish memory—producing a book.  Many of these volumes are in Yiddish or Hebrew and were produced by committees of survivors to document the living worlds of their former hometowns before the Holocaust.  See for example Anṭopol: Anṭipolye: sefer-yizkor, the memorial book to a town in Belarus.

Anti-Semitism and political extremism: The collection documents the history of anti-Semitism, especially U.S. manifestations of Nazism and right-wing extremism, in the form of newspapers, literature, and other ephemera. One such volume is This Time the World, the autobiography of George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi party.

Jewish history: The Mazal collection adds substantially to the CU Boulder library’s existing holdings in books about Jewish history and culture, including many rare nineteenth-century volumes as well as books about Jewish history prior to the twentieth century, the history of Israel, and Jewish communities of the eastern Mediterranean, including La Istorya Cudia para Los Eskolaryos (Jewish History for Students), written in Turkic Romanized Ladino by the Turkish Jewish author and educator Nisim Behar.

War crimes trials: In addition to the hundreds of thousands of pages of original trial transcripts and evidence presented at the various post-war trials, the Mazal collection includes a broad range of books in multiple languages by scholars, journalists, military and legal history enthusiasts, and revisionists about the war crimes trials themselves. An interesting example is a book of Nuremberg Court Cartoons by the journalist Gunter Peis.

Documenting the Holocaust: Given Mazal’s interest in fighting denial, the bulk of the collection focuses on documenting the Holocaust itself. Such works include detailed histories of individual concentration and extermination camps, books about the ghettoes into which the Nazi regime imprisoned European Jews, and studies of methods of killing. This area of the Mazal collection includes the book Be-ge ha-haregah: rishumim (In the Valley of Slaughter: Drawings), a rare 1944 Hebrew-language edition of drawings by the famed German Jewish artist Lea Grundig, showing some of the earliest artistic engagements with the Holocaust.

Holocaust memory and teaching: This includes books about post-war memorial, and museums dedicated to commemorating the Holocaust, as well as grade-school textbooks and guides for teaching about the Holocaust. The collection is especially rich in materials produced about the camps and Holocaust memorialization practices in the post-war era by authors from Poland, Hungary, East Germany and the other formerly-Communist countries where the camps had been located. See, for example, this guide to memorial events held in 1988 in the former East Germany.

Nazism: The collection includes hundreds of items about Nazism and histories of Nazi Germany, including many rare books published by the Nazi party or the German government during the war. Of particular interest are many volumes of Nazi propaganda for both domestic and international consumption. including Reichstagung in Nürnberg 1936: der Parteitag der Ehre a volume commemorating one of the annual Nazi Party congress (commonly known as the “Nuremberg rallies”) held in 1936.

Hitler Youth publications: The collection has pamphlets and other publications targeting youth, including members of the Hitler Youth, including 15 examples of the Kriegsbücherei der Deutschen Jugend series, a collection of Nazi-era children’s book intended to promote German military successes.

World War II and military history: The Mazal collection includes countless items documenting the history of the war, including books about specific military campaigns, commanders, military insignia, equipment, and books about prisoners of war, particularly by Allied troops held in German POW camps. This collecting area also includes maps from the war, as well as Germany: Map of the Occupation Areas. Karte der Besatzungs-Zonen produced in the months after the end of the war in Europe and showing the post-World War II partition of Germany between the Allied Powers.