A survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, he was the author of several books about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, including Das Dritte Reich und die Juden (with Léon Poliakov, 1955); Heinrich Himmler (1960); and Martin Bormann: Hitlers Schatten (1962).

[4] Wulf joined a group of Jewish resistance fighters, but he was captured and imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943, slave labor subcamp Buna-Monowitz.

This commitment found fruition after the war, working for the Jewish Historical Commission in Krakow and co-founding of the Centre for the History of Polish Jews in Paris.

[5] Wulf's wife and son survived the war by hiding with Polish peasants, but he lost his father, mother, brother, mother-in-law, and young niece.

[6] At the end of the war, Wulf remained in Poland, where from 1945 to 1947 he co-founded the Central Jewish Historical Commission, publishing documents about Nazi Germany.

He moved to Stockholm and in the summer of 1947 to Paris, working for a newspaper and the Centre pour l'Histoire des Juifs Polonais, where he met Léon Poliakov, the French historian.

[8] Steven Lehrer writes that Wulf "cut an unmistakeable figure ... [h]e dressed impeccably, carried a walking stick, and held a long cigarette holder clenched between his teeth at a jaunty angle.

[10] The Federal Defence Ministry refused to include the first volume in its list of books recommended for the German army's libraries, because it contained documents signed by military leaders during the Third Reich who were still active in West Germany.

[13] During the Wannsee Conference, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office, had outlined to several leading Nazis, in somewhat coded language, the German government's plan to enact the Final Solution.

[14] In August 1966 Wulf co-founded, with Friedrich Zipfel and Peter Heilmann, the International Document Center Organization for the Study of National Socialism and Its Aftermath, and began campaigning to have it housed in the Wannsee Conference villa.

The Joseph Wulf Mediothek on the second floor, a reference library, houses over 65,000 books, 10,000 films, 120 journal subscriptions, and materials such as microfilms and original Nazi documents.