[3] Part of the efforts of the CDJC include providing educational materials to students and teachers, guided museum visits and field trips, participation in international conferences, activities and commemorations, maintaining monuments and sites like the Mémorial de la Shoah and the monument at Drancy, and most importantly collecting and disseminating documentation about the Holocaust in their extensive archives.
[1] While the Second World War was still underway, the Nazis had already formed a contingency plan that in case of defeat they would carry out the total destruction of German records[4] of the extermination of millions of victims, per Heinrich Himmler's statement to SS officials that the history of the Final Solution would be "a glorious page that will never be written".
In France, this occurred first at Drancy where camp registers were carefully preserved and turned over to the new National Office for Veterans and Victims of War; which however then held them in secret refusing to release copies even to the CDJC.
[4] Already before the end of the war, Isaac Schneersohn, anticipating the need for a center to document and preserve the memory of the persecution for historical reasons and also support claims post-war, gathered 40 representatives from Jewish organizations together at his place at rue Bizanet in Grenoble which was under Italian occupation at the time[1] in order to form a centre de documentation.
One was that these were grassroots movements to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, much of it by people who were not part of academia or trained as historians and thus looked down on by professionals.
Another reason was that much of the early historiography focused on the perpetrators, with little effort aimed at documenting the experience of victims, which was relegated to the domain of "memory" rather than that of "history".
In addition, early efforts consisted of collecting and publishing primary sources and survivor testimonies, and rarely on analysis and thematic interpretation of events which might have attracted more attention from academia.
[citation needed] However, the early efforts in collecting, documenting, and preserving the basic information laid the groundwork for all future Holocaust historiography.
[10] Starting in 1951, works such as Poliakov's Bréviaire de la haine (Harvest of Hate),[11] the first major work on the genocide, first began to reach a wider audience and receive some good reviews[12] in opposition to the prevailing opinion in studies at the time that a major genocide of six million Jews was logistically impossible and thus could not have happened.
[2] The three-volume Le commissariat General aux Question Juives by Joseph Billig published in 3 volumes in 1955-60[13] showed that the French response to roundups of Jews when they were not actively profiting from the spoils, was apathetic at best.
This, in turn, officially changed its name to Le Monde Juif (Jewish World) in July 1946, and was published as a monthly, 24-page magazine with about 1500 charter subscribers.
Schneerson sent Léon Poliakov who had recently joined CJDC as a historian to Nuremberg as an expert researcher, along with an assistant, Joseph Billig.
The Center was also responsible for bringing a key document to light, the original order for the 1944 roundup of Jewish refugee children of Izieu who were later deported to Auschwitz and murdered upon arrival.
[2] Contrary to the opinion that there was no serious scholarship about the Holocaust before the early 1960s, the CDJC had been active going back to the 1940s and 50s, although their efforts were little noted even by historians and were almost totally unknown to the public.
[17] The Barbie trial in Lyon in 1987 once again brought the history of World War II onto the front pages of newspapers and public awareness, and again the proceedings were filmed, due to their exceptional historical importance.
He was responsible for arresting French Resistance member Jean Moulin, and for signing the deportation order for the children from the orphanage at Izieu.
The CDJC was in possession of a key document relating to the deportation of the children from Izieu, and provided a copy to the French courts, which enabled the prosecution of Barbie for Crimes against Humanity.
Faure had actually read the Barbie telegram in his summation to the jury at Nuremberg but without naming him as he was not on trial there, but merely as a way of describing the routine, administrative nature of the killing that was carried out by the Nazis.
[1][7] In 2005, the CDJC and the Memorial of the Unknown Jewish Martyr merged, and was renamed the Mémorial de la Shoah; the new entity opened its doors on January 27, 2005.