Joseph Wulf (1912–1974)

Joseph Wulf was born to a prosperous Jewish family in Chemnitz, Germany, and was raised and educated from age five in Krakow, Poland. His father wanted Joseph to become a rabbi, but he wanted to be a writer. As a young man, he married Jenta Falik-Dachner, with whom he had a son, David. After Nazi Germany occupied Poland in 1939, at the start of World War II, the Wulf family was deported to the Krakow Ghetto. Joseph joined the Jewish resistance but was captured and deported in the Auschwitz concentration camp. He survived and in January 1945, during one of the Nazi death marches away from the camp as the Red Army approached, he escaped. His wife and son survived the war by hiding with Polish peasants, but his father, mother, brother, mother-in-law, and young niece all were killed. After the war, Wulf published some of the first books about the Nazi regime available in Germany, co-founding the Central Jewish Historical Commission. In 1947, he moved to Paris, where he worked for a newspaper and the Centre pour l'Histoire des Juifs Polonais (Center for the History of Polish Jews), where he met French historian Léon Poliakov. In 1952, he moved to Berlin.
Wulf and Poliakov co-wrote several history books, including Das Dritte Reich und die Juden (The Third Reich and the Jews, 1955); Das Dritte Reich und seine Diener (The Third Reich and its Servants, 1956); and Das Dritte Reich und seine Denker (The Third Reich and its Thinkers, 1959). These works broke a taboo in West Germany by placing the Holocaust at the center of the study of Nazi Germany, unlike the approach of other German historians at the time. The books attracted national and international press coverage. Wulf went on to publish several more major works about Nazi Germany, among them biographies of Heinrich Himmler and Martin Bormann. In 1961, he won the Leo Baeck Prize and in 1964 the Carl von Ossietzky Medal. Wulf struggled for decades to try to persuade the West German government to establish a a Holocaust memorial and documentation center in the villa in a Berlin suburb where the notorious Wannsee Conference to plan the murder of Europe's Jews took place on January 20, 1942, but in vain. Distraught over the death of his wife and the collapse of his plans for the memorial, Wulf took his own life in 1974. However, in 1992, the Wannsee House was indeed made into memorial. The Joseph Wulf Library inside was named in his honor.