The interviews were conducted on the occasion of Rotterdam Celebrates the City in 2016, a cultural event around the commemoration of the reconstruction, and the term “reconstruction” should be understood broadly in this collection. For example, in addition to architects and municipal workers from the postwar period, Rotterdammers with an immigrant background and younger Rotterdammers were interviewed about their views on life in the Maas City.

Initially, the goal of project Soul of the Reconstruction was not focused historical research, but the compilation of an audiobook of the same name for a wide audience. This book consists of four CDs with excerpts from the interviews, along with brief descriptions of the people interviewed. These descriptions have been reproduced in DANS.

The interviews have been deposited with DANS. The Stadsarchief Rotterdam preserves the collection. The process of making the collection available online was carried out by the Erasmus Studio of Erasmus University Rotterdam. They took care of the metadata of the collection, tested automatic speech recognition and created a standard workflow for this process, so that in the future institutions will know which steps to take when they want to make interviews available for research in the Media Suite.

The interviews are almost entirely in Dutch and consist of an audio recording with a transcript attached. These transcripts vary greatly in quality: many of the transcripts are incomplete and some only have time-stamped subjects. Of the total 86 interviews, not all will be uploaded at one time due to privacy statements that are not yet complete. This is the reason why for now not all interviews from number 1 to 86 are online.

Eric de Lange (1947-2003), sociologist, researched Socialist Youth of the Netherlands founded in 1960.

From the contact between the Zaanse PSP youth and members of the radical Politeia branch in Rotterdam; movement for young people that had to fill a gap after the disappearance of traditional socialist youth movements. SJ had revolutionary socialist foundations and sought a better society through actions and study circles. In this new movement, Politeians dominated. SJ became a small but very active and disciplined organisation. It tried to uphold the traditional ideals and symbols of the socialist labour movement. Examples included Pentecostal camps, the address title of ‘comrade’ and the wearing of blue shirts.

Oral history interviews with feminists who pioneered women’s mental and physical health care.

For brief descriptions of the interviewees, see the website van Artria

On 31 March 1943, American bombers took off from a base in Great Britain for a mission against the German occupying forces in the Netherlands. The targets were the Rotterdam harbour installations. Due to a combination of unfavourable circumstances, including bad weather that made navigation difficult, 70 heavy bombs fell on the Rotterdam housing estate Bospolder-Tussendijken. Some 326 people were killed and the devastation was enormous. Fires could not be extinguished immediately due to a shortage of water and spread quickly due to the strong winds. Hundreds of wounded and thousands of homeless people had to be cared for in the already difficult war conditions.

As part of this oral-history project, eyewitnesses were interviewed about this allied mistake bombing. The eyewitnesses talk about the consequences of the bombardment for their personal lives and about its significance for the social cohesion of the affected neighbourhood. The question is also raised what this Allied bombardment meant for the anti-German sentiment of those involved.

Young Cape Verdean Rotterdammers conducted interviews in 2014 with Cape Verdeans who had arrived in the city between 1955 and 1975 and had made a living there.

In 2021, International Studies student Maxime Schut at Leiden University studied six interviews from 2014. She also interviewed seven Cape Verdean interviewers about why it was important for them to take part in the project. Thus, a collection of interviews was formed on audio and video, transcribed and sometimes translated.

The podcast draws attention to this collection and to the history of Cape Verdians in Rotterdam, but also to the importance of preserving these kinds of stories for future generations.

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On the evening of 9 November 1944, 8,000 German soldiers were deployed in Aktion Rosenstock. A cordon was quietly erected around Rotterdam and Schiedam. On the following two days, a total of more than 52,000 Rotterdammers and Schiedammers between the ages of seventeen and forty were rounded up and taken to Germany. Forced labour was the main objective, but the occupying forces also wanted to remove all able-bodied men from the western part of the Netherlands by means of the raid.

During their employment in Germany and the eastern part of the Netherlands, several thousand Rotterdammers died due to illness, malnutrition, escape attempts and acts of war. After the war ended, most of the forced labourers returned home as Displaced Persons.

With the capture of 52,000 men, the Rotterdam razzia was the largest manhunt conducted by the German National Socialist regime. For the project Reis van de Razzia, a total of 76 interviews with witnesses were recorded, providing insight into what happened.

Razzia’s. Deportatie mannen, Rotterdam. Foto is gemaakt in een woning aan de Oudedijk te Rotterdam. 10/11/1944. © L.M.A. van der Werff