Institutional memory
Institutional memory is the collective recollection of facts, know-how, experiences and events within an organization or a connected group of people. It is the “why” to the “what”, “when” and “where”. It tells the members of the group how they got where they are and what the reasoning was behind the decisions that were made.
Good organizations attempt to document institutional memory, so that the context of their history can be seen and so that lessons once learned need not be relearned. In societies, institutional memory may not be in writing, but passed from parents to children or from teachers to students. If the passing on process is not faithful to the original, “memory” becomes distorted and may become entirely incorrect from the reality that existed.
The Great Depression is an example of an event for which there is some institutional memory but the passing on process has been faulty. It is impossible to listen to interviews of that era, or read accounts of the decade long depression without wondering how modern views could be so wrong.
People starved to death in the Great Depression. Dust storms turned the skies of the Plains black for days. Up to half of the men in the United States were out of work or working at jobs below their training and education. This was in no way comparable to the current recession, the one in 2000 or any other recession. Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression
The history of the Holocaust is a good example of how slight changes, over the course of decades, can produce a significant effect. The death camps and the work camps set up by the Nazi regime were not just six or seven large camps, but an entire network for each major camp of smaller, satellite camps. As demonstrated in our work on the Ohrdruf Photos, Germany is engaged in removing all of these smaller facilities. Often the only sign that there was once a Nazi camp at a location is a small sign.
The Holocaust deniers have long maintained that the Nazis could not have possibly murdered the numbers of people that they did. Two sources of institutional memory that once existed are disappearing and that is playing into the hands of the deniers.
The people who lived through Nazi persecution, and survived the camps, are very elderly or dead. In a decade or so, no one will be left who experienced life in a camp will be alive to tell their story. The veterans of World War II who liberated the camps are also dying. If there are no witnesses left alive, institutional memory must be the source for the truth.
The deniers point to the existing camps as clearly inadequate to handle the numbers that were killed. That is a sad truth. The many, many satellite camps are gone, or soon to be gone, and they were the only concrete and visible proof of the gigantic network the Nazis built to kill or enslave people. Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust [All-Region]
It is important to our children and their children that the oral memories of the elderly be recorded in print or in magnetic media form. Without institutional memory, terms such as “the Great Depression” or “the Holocaust” take on different meanings from the stark reality that existed at the time.
