our allies will defeat this enemy, and we can do this in and out of uniform. it is a plain fact that we would not have won this war until japan is completely crushed. announcer: two down and one to go. announcer 1: in 1945, 70 years ago, allied forces liberated the not the concentration camps. we will hear holocaust stories from those who live them -- lived them. this is part of the united states holocaust memorial museum in washington, d.c. in this interview, kurt klein: fled not to germany.

he died in 2002 at the age of 81. in the interview, he describes as an interrogator of the u.s. army, he describes hitler as a driver and hitler's final days. we first asked for the oral history collection -- first explore the oral history collection. leslie swift: my name is leslie swift, and i represent the oral history collection. this branch is intended to collect similar types of media together, so audio and visual media, and of course, oral history. interview or:er: how long has oral histories been collected by the museum? leslie swift: these have been

collected since 1989 in preparation of opening the museum, and we have also gotten oral histories from other museums. interviewer: what was the point of this project? leslie swift: this came into being and to illustrate the point of the museum, which opened in 1993, so it was to tell personal stories of experience with the holocaust for the museum visitor. interviewer: how did you persuade people to recall such painful memories? leslie swift: it is a delicate issue, we have a volunteer and staff trained in dealing with the delicate subject matter. some people are more willing to talk than others. some people did not talk for many, many years about their

experiences, but later in life, whether it is their family asking them or whether it is historical trends within the larger culture, they came to realize that their stories were very important to be told. interviewer: how did you go about getting the interviews? leslie swift: there are so many people still to be interviewed or have been over the past year that usually people come to us. we than in evaluating whether they have given an oral history before or we have several criteria that we go through where we conduct or history. interviewer: what is your criteria? leslie swift: they have to be interviewed by a large foundation and whether they have direct memories from the period in other words, they were not six months old and later were told of the events, but experienced the events themselves.

interviewer: do you start early in an individual pot life, or du you pick a particular time in the holocaust -- individual's life, or do you pick a particular time in the holocaust? leslie swift: it varies, for example, it depends what you ask, were your parents religious, what was your immediate family life, what was your community like before the holocaust happened? and it goes up to the time of when the holocaust began and there are times when it just focuses on the holocaust in itself, but in general, we do try to. get a larger context in the story. -- to get a larger context in the story. interviewer: how long do the interviews usually last? leslie swift: they can go from an hour to several hours long. interviewer: once you have an

interview, where did they go in the museum, where is it stored who has access to them? leslie swift: we are working very hard to to digital eyes all of our interviews for people to look at, so we still have a lot of tapes that are stored off-site and off-site storage facility, and all of the interviews we are currently conducting now are in a digital format so they come to the museum, they are quality check they are catalogued into our cataloging system, and then barring any legal restriction we make them available online to the public. interviewer: who has access, do it journalists and scholars have access? leslie swift: anyone has access to the collection, it is not entirely digitized, but we are making great strides every day to as much as possible online, because collecting the material is very important, but so is the accessibility part of it.

interviewer: along the way, have there been any particular revelations or surprises or unexpected stories that you collected? leslie swift: there have been many many unexpected and interesting stories, and i will say that we are continuing to conduct interviews to this day that have new and unexplored areas of interest. what i find interesting in the general picture is the way that we -- the type of experience that we have collected over time has changed, although we still get the experience of holocaust survivors, people in camps, people who fled before the war people who resisted or rescuers, that type of thing but we also collect stories from liberators and we collect a

great number of interviews from people who were witnesses or even perpetrators of the crimes at the time. so the type of material that we have collected, the type of experience has really changed with holocaust historiography. this is as well as with, for example, we have a temporary exhibition at the museum right now on duplicity, so we have a number of really interesting interviews from that perspective , the live history of people were not persecuted, but were witnesses to persecution, or even participants in persecution. interviewer: what percentage of your interviews are from persecutors, and with th -- would this be notnazis? leslie swift: yes, these people

are not eager to discuss their crimes during the war, but we do have a couple of which are on display in the contemporary -- in the temporary exhibition right now. interviewer: and the evolution of how the holocaust is studied which you mentioned earlier, how would you describe the emphasis of study now and how is that driving the kind of stories that you are looking for, in addition to the exhibit that you mentioned? leslie swift: we are very interested in the stories that make us unique, definitely unique, but other stories of other persecuted groups in the history also poles also jehovah witnesses and we also mentioned that we are interested in other experiences of people who were not directly persecuted, but what they were doing when this was happening.

were they helping their neighbors over the taking their neighbor's things? was that a culmination of things because things were garry cobb located? -- things were very complicated? i think this ran a wide gamut of emotions and reaction, as you would expect. as i said, people have told their stories over and over again, people have got to schools and gave speeches where they discuss their experiences but for others, this is their first time on really opening up about it and it is a very delicate area foremost people, as it would be with such a traumatic event. interviewer: the museum has an exhibit called first person, i believe, is this about survivors and is it about them giving an oral history? leslie swift: yes, there are

survivor volunteers, and i would say that all of them have provided oral histories to the museum as well, through that program. interviewer: how do you think oral histories have contributed to our understanding of the holocaust? leslie swift: oral testimony in general can serve as a complicating factor an important factor to official documents or diaries or letters from the period, i think historians from the past are wary of using testimony as a primary source. i think that has changed a lot over the years and that historians are realizing the incredible value and volatility of this live history. in may contradict the