Tracing the Dislocation of a Sinti Family in a Genocidal Context: the R165 Collection of the German Federal Archives

In September 1981, in the basement of the Tübingen University, German survivors of the Sinti and Roma genocide and remembrance activists captured the racial archives created by the scientific authorities under the Nazi regime to identify, deport and destroy their families.1 The documents seized were immediately given to the German Federal Archives. Today, this vast Read More

“We spend our lives living in darkness, in cold, and often in hunger.” – Jewish Entreaties to Slovak President Jozef Tiso During the Holocaust

Thousands of Jews throughout Europe, facing a shrinking universe of options and increasingly desperate circumstances, wrote to the representatives of the very governments that were persecuting them to ask for clemency from anti-Semitic measures during the Holocaust. They employed a variety of rhetorical strategies in their appeals, hoping that their words would be sufficiently convincing Read More

“It is Folly not to do Anything, Even if one can not do Everything”

Introduction On August 19, 1944, a quite extraordinary thing happened in Hungary, which had been under German occupation for five months already. Dr János Benedek, the főszolgabíró 1  of the Kiskőrös district ordered the internment of István Velich, the agricultural officer of the district and local functionary of the Eastern Frontline Companions’ Association (Keleti Arcvonal Read More

“Re-Germanization” and the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle Camps: The Geography of Expulsion

“Extermination and assimilation were two sides of the same coin.”1  The author of this alarming phrase is one of the very few scholars who have written in English2 about the ‘re-Germanization” program run in part by the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (Ethnic German Liaison Office, an SS agency set up to take care of the needs of Read More

Forced Labourers and the Water Works Camps in the Lublin District

Depicting non-industrial forced labour: The example of water works camps in the Lublin district The photograph depicts a rarely discussed topic in Holocaust historiography: The daily life of Jewish forced labourers in early water works camps (Wasserwirtschaftslager) in the Lublin District. The series of photographs from the archives of the Institute of National Remembrance at Read More

Card File of the Jewish Population in the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia

Preserved remnants of registration card files of Jews in the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia open important questions of the state of Holocaust documentation as well as of the deployment of modern technology in registering and deporting European Jews. This post analyses the history and structure of the WWII central card file held today at the Read More