The Ball-Kaduri Testimony Collection (Yad Vashem)

Dr. Kurt Ball-Kaduri was born in Berlin in 1891. A lawyer and legal adviser to the Prussian government, he was also active in Jewish affairs. He made Aliyah to Eretz Israel in December 1938.

Ball-Kaduri, who was active in collecting material and writing about German Jewry, became aware that much material that reached the archives regarding Jewish life in Germany from 1933 to 1945 was incomplete and that there were large information gaps.

He decided to gather testimonies of people involved in Jewish life and the activities of Jewish organizations. In 1943, Ball-Kaduri began to collect the information and actually established his collection. He contacted various people in Eretz Israel whom he knew, asking them to write their recollections and interviewing some of them himself. In 1955 he handed the collection over to Yad Vashem while continuing to collect related documentation for Yad Vashem until 1960.

The collection includes testimonies of Jewish leaders in various areas of Jewish life in Germany. Although it includes significant documentation regarding the fate of individual victims of the Holocaust, the main emphasis of the Record Group is on the different Jewish organizations.

There are over 300 files in the record group. Most of the collection is written in German and about half of the testimonies have been translated into Hebrew.