The Holocaust Survivor Who Deciphered Nazi Doublespeak

YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which contains the largest Holocaust collection in North America, recently acquired Nachman Blumental’s personal papers in February.

Blumental was one of World War II’s earliest historians, and his personal papers reveal his obsession with how Nazis distorted the German language.

In the summer of 2018, the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies provided space for Katrin Stoll, a German Holocaust scholar to help process the Blumental papers. In the article, Katrin speaks to how survivor historians like Blumental had to figure out how to relate to their own experiences and the larger experience of the war.