Oral history interviews with survivors of the Holocaust and Nazi concentration camps have become a vital source in research on the persecution and extermination of the European Jews and other victim groups. Starting in the 1970s collecting audio and video interviews became an important task to record the experiences of survivors before the end of the “era of the witness” (Wieviorka 2006). Archives in the U.S. alone are holding more than 80,000 interviews (Taubitz 2016). Although many of these testimonies are already accessible online and indexed with keywords, creating a sample for specific research projects is still hindered by lack of information on the content of the interviews, the contexts and purposes of production as well as the different languages in which the interviews were conducted (and the lack of transcripts and translations).
In the presentation I will focus on a collection of 850 interviews with survivors of Mauthausen concentration camp conducted in 2002/03. I will show that a quantitative approach to oral history interviews is a fruitful way to complement the level of individual experiences with supra-individual structures – a method already proposed by Gerhard Botz in 1988. For my research, I used a database created together with the collection of interviews. This database was enriched with information on the interviewees found in “perpetrator’s sources” enabling to contrast information given by survivors with the latter sources (e.g. on the reason of persecution and the trajectories through the Nazi camp archipelago). Thus, the creation of “epistemical individuals” (Bourdieu) allowed the construction of sub-samples for specific qualitative research questions (e.g. experiences on a death march; skills and professions before, during and after persecution). I will also raise the limits of such an approach, namely the question of representativity of the interview collection and the problem of missing data.