Honoring Barbara Distel

Director of the Dachau Memorial Museum since 1975 and widely acclaimed as the pre-eminent authority on the history of Dachau, Barbara Distel oversees archival materials dealing with the lives-and deaths-of more than 200,000 persons imprisoned in this first of the German concentration camps (1933-1945). Hers is a singularly significant enterprise since the history of Dachau reflects in many ways the history of the Holocaust itself.

Distel began working as an assistant at the museum during her high school years, later earning a degree in library science at the University of Munich. Today her responsibilities include the supervision of the museum's library of 13,000 books and monographs dealing with concentration camps in general-Dachau in particular- including records of medical experiments conducted on the prisoners by camp physicians. Also included are diaries, letters, memoirs, and videotaped interviews of former inmates, many bequeathed to the archive by the estates of deceased survivors.

Distel has published a variety of papers during her career and currently works with Professor Wolfgang Benz (Berlin Institute for Research on Anti-Semitism) in editing and publishing the annual Dachauer Hefte (Dachau Review) which won the prestigious prize, Geschwister Scholl Preiss, in 1992 for its volume on "Solidarity and Resistance." According to the awarding Jury, the memoirs, documents, and scientific studies of the Dachauer Hefte help "to rescue the Nazi past from oblivion" and thereby work to prevent what the Jury referred to as a "second guilt of suppressing the past."