American film director Steven Spielberg has granted a Berlin university access to the Shoah Foundation's archive of interviews from Holocaust survivors.
This agreement with the Free University marks the first time that a non-US institution has received access to the entire archive.
The FU will be allowed to use 52,000 video testimonies collected by Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, which began gathering material after the making of Oscar-winning film 'Schlindler's List'.
The interviews are mostly with Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, but also include Jehovah's Witnesses, gay, Roma and political prisoners.
Other interviews are with witnesses, liberators of the concentration camps and people who testified at war crimes tribunals after World War II.
"History not only consists of facts and figures, but also of individual ways of life and personal destiny," said Dieter Lentzen, the President of the Free University.
