Bernd Ewald Althans Collection
In 2000 the Institute received a major portion of Bernd Ewald Althans' papers, as well as his comprehensive collection of books, brochures, videos, and audio cassettes. Althans was a prominent member of various organizations of the extreme right in Germany in the 1980s. In 1990 he organized in Munich the conference "Wahrheit macht frei," which was a landmark in the history of revisionism, the movement to deny or dismiss the Holocaust. He became known to a broader audience through the documentary film Beruf: Neo-Nazi (1996). In 1995 he was sentenced to a three-and-a-half year imprisonment as a Holocaust denier and for agitation.
After his release in 1998 he left Germany and started writing his memoirs in cooperation with the German magazine Der Spiegel. By 1993 he was no longer sympathetic to the Neonazis.
From 1990 on Althans ran a bookstore in Munich that dealt mainly with revisionist and National Socialist propaganda and documentary materials. This store, known as Althans Vertriebswege und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit (AVÖ), was ordered closed by the German courts
More than 2500 books, countless brochures, and several video and audio cassettes from this collection have now been catalogued by the Institute. The material deals with the glorification of Nazism and its protagonists, revisionism, and the history written about World War II.
This material adds considerably to the Institute's collection about the extreme right, which was started before World War II and continues to grow through regular contributions from the Anne Frank Stichting and other anti-fascist institutions and individuals.
The enormous number of Althans' papers will be catalogued when the last part is handed over to the IISH, after his book is finished. The books and brochures, as well as the video and audio cassettes can be found by searching the online catalogue with collection code "Althans".