1. Joseph Wulf was a German-Polish Jewish historian.
12 Facts About Joseph Wulf
1. 2.
Joseph Wulf's father had hoped he would become a rabbi, but he turned instead to writing.
3.
Joseph 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.
4.
Joseph Wulf preserved two songs he composed while in Auschwitz, including Sunbeams, which features prominently in the 2023 film The Zone of Interest.
5.
Joseph Wulf survived one of the notorious death marches that took place just before the camp's liberation, when the SS forced inmates to move to different camps after fleeing, on 18 January 1945.
6.
Joseph Wulf 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 Leon Poliakov, the French historian.
7.
Joseph Wulf went on to publish several more works about Nazi Germany, among them biographies of Heinrich Himmler and Martin Bormann.
8.
Joseph Wulf was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Free University of Berlin.
9.
In 1965 Joseph Wulf proposed that the villa in Berlin in which the 1942 Wannsee Conference was held should be made into a Holocaust memorial and research centre.
10.
The issue of the memorial was so politically sensitive in Germany that Joseph Wulf apparently needed police protection because of threats.
11.
However, posthumously, Joseph Wulf won out in the creation of such a museum at Wannsee.
12.
Joseph Wulf is buried in Holon on the central coast of Israel, south of Tel Aviv.