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The Institute in the news
Last summer, I watched the disturbingly iconic reel of black-and-white footage that revealed the shameful truth of Bergen-Belsen.
The grainy footage, which many of us have seen, was taken at the concentration camp in Germany, a few days after the liberation on April 15, 1945. It offered one of the first glimpses into the hell that was the Holocaust. Under the armed command of liberators from the British Army, SS men are seen unloading the skeletal corpses of the Jews they’d murdered from the back of a pickup truck, and carrying them to a mass grave.
Historian Julia Werner discovered this set of photos in the Jewish Museum in Rendsburg, Germany, and they constitute one of the only visual records we have of the construction of an open-air ghetto. Taken on June 16, 1940, by German soldier Wilhelm Hansen, the 83 images (a selection of which can be seen below) track the forced movement of the Jewish population of Kutno, Poland, from their homes to the grounds of an abandoned sugar factory, where they were ordered to set up camp.
There were audible gasps in the White House press room Tuesday when spokesman Sean Spicer appeared to forget about the Holocaust in asserting that the Syrian military's use of sarin gas on civilians exceeded the atrocities of Nazi Germany.
With Spicer's credibility already strained, opposition Democrats and others began calling for the White House press secretary to be removed from his position.
In the small Guatemalan village of Dos Erres in 1982, 250 people were killed by government soldiers. The documentary, "Finding Oscar," traces the story of one of the few survivors who didn't even know his own history until recently. It also explores the U.S. government's role in the Guatemalan civil war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996.
More than 70 years have passed since the end of World War II, but USC’s expanded collection of wartime artifacts may soon be able to offer new historical insights.
David and Andrea Stanley donated hundreds of items to USC Libraries and the USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research. The objects came from Andrea Stanley’s father Harry Wolff, Jr., an American Jewish soldier who served in Europe during the war, and includes numerous paper documents that depict Wolff’s wartime experiences.
Filmmaker Steven Spielberg and the USC Shoah Foundation honored filmmaker George Lucas and his investment executive-wife, Mellody Hobson, for their commitment to education, diversity and humanitarian efforts during the Ambassadors for Humanity Gala at the Ray Dolby Ballroom at the Hollywood & Highland center in Hollywood.