Comparative Study of Genocide: Primary Sources

Think about what types of primary sources might have been produced that would be relevant to your topic; think also about which persons or organizations might have produced materials. Some possible types of sources:

Finding Background Information

Gather the information you have about your topic and consider what you still need to know before you start researching.  You can use this information in searching for primary sources.

• Dates
• Places
• Names of persons involved
• Names of organizations, government agencies, societies, etc.

Reference works and secondary sources can help you find background information on your topic.  You may find reference sources by:

• browsing the reference collection at the appropriate campus library
• searching by the appropriate subject headings and adding additional subject terms such as:  encyclopedias, dictionaries, bibliographies. Examples:  
  • Indians of north america encyclopedias
  • women diaries bibliography

See also the section on News and Research Groups in this guide.

Documentation Centers

• Bangladesh Genocide Archive.  Online archive and chronology of events, documentations, audio, video, images, media reports and eyewitness accounts of the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh.
• Documentation Center of Cambodia. Cambodian non-governmental organization whose mission is to research and record the era of Kampuchea for the purposes of memory and justice.
• Eurodocs Shoah (Holocaust). Links to primary historical documents covering the Holocaust/Shoah and Anti-Semitism. 
• Genocide Archive Rwanda. Videos relating to the 1994 Genocide enriched with synchronized transcripts, searchable index terms, and maps.
• Harvard Law School Library Nuremberg Trials Project. Open-access initiative to create and present digitized images or full-text versions of Harvard Library's Nuremberg documents, with descriptions of each document, and general information about the trials.
• National Security Archive at George Washington University.  Investigative journalism center, research institute on international affairs, library and archive of declassified U.S. documents. See especially the Genocide Documentation Project and Guatemalan Documentation Project.
• University of Minnesota Human Rights Library.  A comprehensive portal linking to thousands of human rights documents and organizations (IGOs and NGOs). Includes a unique search device for multiple human rights sites. Section on International Criminal Tribunals.
• Virtual Tribunals.  International criminal tribunal records (1945-present). Includes trial records from the Special Panels for Serious Crimes in East Timor (SPSC) and digitized documents of IMT Nuremberg from the International Court of Justice.
• Yad Vesham. World Holocaust Remembrance Center. Digital archive of documents, photos related to the Holocaust. Includes links to databases about victims, deportation, and more. 
• Yale's Project Avalon Nuremberg Trials Digital Collection. From the Yale Law School Library.

Video and Image Archives

• University of Minnesota Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies. Images of local Holocaust survivors, American concentration camp liberators, testimonies and more.
• USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Online. Provides access to all of the metadata of the 55,000 testimonies in the Archive as well as a subset of more than 4,000 testimonies for immediate viewing online.
• Yale Fortunoff Video Archive. Consists of over 4,400 testimonies of Holocaust survivors, witnesses and liberators

Additional Library Research Guides

• Genocide Studies (Rutgers University)
• Holocaust and Genocide Studies (University of Minnesota)
• Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Florida International University)