Joseph Wulf

Joseph Wulf
Joseph Wulf, identification photograph. Occupied Krakow, August 1940
Born	(1912-12-22)22 December 1912 Chemnitz, Kingdom of Saxony, German Empire (now Free State of Saxony, Germany)
Died	10 October 1974(1974-10-10) (aged 61) Charlottenburg, West Berlin (now Berlin)
Nationality	German
Occupation	Historian
Known for	Wannsee House Memorial

Joseph Wulf (22 December 1912 – 10 October 1974) was a German-Polish-Jewish historian and Holocaust survivor.

Born in Chemnitz, the child of a Jewish family, Wulf was educated in Krakow. At the Jewish university there he was trained as a Rabbi. After the German occupation of Poland in the Second World War the Wulf family was deported to the Krakow Ghetto. There Wulf joined a Jewish group of resistance fighters. He was captured and imprisoned in Auschwitz Concentration Camp, and he survived after fleeing one of the notorious death marches. His wife and son survived the war, but he lost his father, mother, brother, sister-in-law, and niece.

At war's end Wulf remained in Poland, and was from 1945 to 1947 executive member of the Central Jewish Historical Commission. In the summer of 1947 he moved to Paris and worked for the Centre pour l'Histoire des Juifs Polonais. In 1952 Wulf moved to Berlin. Wulf published many books about the Third Reich, among them biographies of Heinrich Himmler and Martin Bormann.

Wulf was honored with the Leo Baeck Prize (1961), the Carl von Ossietzky Medal (1964), and an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Berlin.

In 1965, Wulf proposed that the Wannsee House, the site of the Wannsee Conference in 1942, should be made into a Holocaust memorial and document centre, but the German government was not interested at that time. The building was in use as a school, and funding was not available.

Despondent, Wulf committed suicide in 1974 by jumping from the fifth floor window of his apartment at Giesebrechtstraße 12 in Charlottenburg. In his last letter to his son David, he wrote, "I have published 18 books about the Third Reich and they have had no effect. You can document everything to death for the Germans. There is a democratic regime in Bonn. Yet the mass murderers walk around free, live in their little houses, and grow flowers." Wulf is buried in Holon on the central coast of Israel, south of Tel Aviv.