Academics cease support for Holocaust center

A group of academics have withdrawn their support for an Austrian Holocaust Studies center due to the limited access to the center's archive.

According to a letter sent to the Associated Press, the university professors and researchers are provided with limited access and in some cases with no access to the archive of Vienna's Jewish community.

The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies began provisional operations in January. Its purpose is to give researchers access to roughly 8,000 files of the late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and to parts of a vast archive belonging to Jewish Community Vienna, which represents the city's Jewish Community.

Earlier this month, former officials at the institute — including Anton Pelinka, the former chairman of the executive committee; and business manager Ingo Zechner — announced they were quitting, saying scholars would not be able to do independent research due to the archive restrictions.

In a copy of the letter obtained by the AP, 12 of the institute's 15-member international academic advisory board said they, too, were dropping out.

"The International Advisory Board of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute has noted with increasing concern that the conditions under which the institute could carry out its work with the necessary degree of scholarly independence can no longer be met," the academics wrote in the letter dated Monday.

"On the basis of the information available to us and in view of the resignations...we conclude that the board no longer serves a useful purpose."

The letter was co-signed by, among others, Yehuda Bauer, professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; David Bankier, head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem; and Tom Segev, an Israeli historian, journalist and Wiesenthal biographer.