Spielberg widens Holocaust archive access

Steven Spielberg has granted a German university access to his collection of 52,000 video interviews with survivors of the Holocaust.

The Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, which was established by the director following 1993 film Schindler's List, can now be accessed in full for the first time outside America by students at the Free University in Berlin.

Director of the Shoah Foundation, Douglas Greenberg said one of the organisation's most important goals was to allow as broad an audience as possible to access the huge archive of footage with Holocaust survivors, witnesses and other victims of persecution from 56 countries.

Free University President Dieter Lenzen says: "History is not only comprised of numbers and facts but also the course of people's lives and fates - that is exactly what this archive documents."

More than six million Jews were killed by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust.