Ravensbrück Archives designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site

UNESCO designates the unique archive with testimonies from the Holocaust as a World Heritage Site, thereby emphasizing that the Ravensbrück Archive at Lund University Library constitutes a cultural heritage of great value to humanity.

In the spring of 1945, prisoners liberated from Nazi concentration camps arrived in Malmö on the White Buses. Many of these prisoners were women from different backgrounds who had been in the Ravensbrück camp. Their eyewitness accounts and the objects they brought with them are preserved for posterity in an archive in Lund, known as the Ravensbrück Archive.

The Torsten Söderberg Foundation has contributed to the University Library's work of registering, digitizing and transcribing the contents of the archive. The important material has been digitally available to the public and researchers around the world for some years.

- "Highlighting testimonies from the Holocaust is important, not least so that future generations can learn about the victims' stories. The fact that UNESCO now designates the Ravensbrück Archive as a World Heritage Site honors the important collection work that was carried out in 1945 and which we all now have access to digitally," says Maria Söderberg, Chairman of the Torsten Söderberg Foundation.

The archive includes 5,500 meticulously recorded pages and over 500 unique eyewitness accounts, mostly in Polish, from Ravensbrück and other concentration camps. The Ravensbrück Archive is available on the Witnessing Genocide web portal.