Gale to digitize McMaster University's Holocaust and Resistance Collections

Gale and McMaster University have announced an agreement for Gale to digitize McMaster University's collection of materials related to the Holocaust, propaganda and the Jewish underground resistance movement during the Second World War. "The depth and importance of the McMaster collection make it one of the leading Holocaust and Resistance archives in the world," said Jim Draper, vice president and publisher, Gale. "We are proud to have the opportunity to digitize these invaluable documents - and to make them available to a wider audience - so that students and researchers, no matter their location, can access these extraordinary materials that are crucial to a full understanding of the magnitude of the Holocaust and the period of the Second World War." The Holocaust collection covers the period between 1933 and 1945, when millions of people were imprisoned and died in Nazi concentration camps throughout Europe. Nearly 2,000 poignant letters in several different languages from or to prisoners in Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz, as well as in Gestapo prisons and POW camps, comprise much of the collection's material. In many instances there are 20 letters or more written by the same prisoner, an uncommon feature in such a collection when often only a single letter survives. There is also a diary of the Nazi evacuation from Ravensbrück (women's concentration camp) as well as a hand-fashioned recipe book which prisoners exchanged among themselves. This collection also includes books, posters, magazines, newspapers and air-drop leaflets