The Imperial War Museum (IWM) is the United Kingdom’s national museum of war and conflict.

IWM’s Sound Archive holds over 33,000 recordings relating to conflict since 1914. This makes it the largest oral history collection of its type in the world, with contributions from both service personnel and non-combatants as well as significant holdings of speeches, sound effects, broadcasts and music. The range of material collected is vast, with the bulk of the collection comprising oral history recordings with veterans of the First and Second World Wars but continuing up to the present day. Interviewees are largely drawn from Great Britain, the former Empire and the Commonwealth, but there are a number of recordings with Europeans and Americans as well.

One of the largest and most important parts of the IWM Sound Archive consists of oral history interviews concerning the Holocaust, covering testimony from survivors but also the experiences of liberators, descendants and those living through the key events of that time.

The majority of our interviews were conducted since the 1970s, and generally run to several hours in length as we seek to cover all of the key events in each interviewee’s life that relate to their personal experience of war. As far as copyright allows, we aim to publish as many of our interviews as possible via our website www.iwm.org.uk.