Historian. Wulf was the son of a well-to-do merchant. When he was five years old, his family moved to Krakow. His father wanted him to be a rabbi, but Wulf aspired to be a writer. In 1941, Wulf joined the resistance, while his wife and son hid in the home of a Polish farmer. Two years later, the Gestapo captured Wulf, and after a month of cruel interrogation sent him to Auschwitz. There, SS-guards tattooed his arm with his inmate number, 114866. He survived two years and a death march before the Red Army freed him. He found his wife and son miraculously still alive, but the Germans had murdered his father, mother, brother, sister-in-law, and niece. After the war, Wulf published some of the first books about the Nazi regime available in Germany. In 1965 Wulf tried to establish a Holocaust memorial and documentation center in the Wannsee House, where Reinhard Heydrich had announced Hitler's decision to murder the Jews of Europe, January 20, 1942. Wulf had prominent supporters, but the Berlin Senate would not make the building available. The Senators wanted no Holocaust memorials and spurned Wulf. At the end of his life, Wulf believed all his efforts had been in vain. "I have published 18 books about the Third Reich," he lamented, "and they have had no effect. You can document everything to death for the Germans. There is a democratic regime in Bonn. Yet the mass murderers walk around free, live in their little houses, and grow flowers." Distraught over the death of his wife and the collapse of his plans for a document center, Wulf committed suicide by jumping from the fifth floor window of his Berlin apartment. In 1992, the Wannsee House was made a memorial. The Joseph Wulf Mediothek, on the second floor, holds thousands of books on Nazism, anti-Semitism, and the Jewish genocide, along with many videos, microfilm texts, and original Nazi era documents.

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