The research literature on the war crimes committed in Southeastern Europe during the Second World War and their (ever-changing) place in collective memory fills entire libraries. Nevertheless, these crimes are hardly anchored in the pan-European memory. This is partly due to the fact that, on the one hand, the political instrumentalization of the history of the Second World War in Southeastern Europe continues to this day—for example, through the simplistic assignment of victim and perpetrator roles along the lines of ethnicity or through historical-political and historical revisionist debates about the number of victims of crimes. However, this is also due to the fact that the crimes committed by the occupying powers in Southeastern Europe and their victims are rarely present in the public culture of remembrance, for example, in today’s Federal Republic of Germany or in Italy.
During the conference, the panelists will deal with the transnational history and memory of marginalized and forgotten sites in Southeastern Europe where genocide and systematic murder took place during the Second World War.
The conference is financed by Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft e.V. and by the European Union through the CERV program, as part of the project „Between memory and oblivion: WWII places of remembrance (BMO)”.
To follow the online panels „Forgotten places of World War Two”, on Saturday 13 May, from 09:00 to 11:00; and „Holocaust and genocide memorialisation after the war and nowadays”, on Sunday 14 May, from 9:30 to 11:30, please register here.
Here you can download the program of the conference.