The view of the year 1944 varies greatly in Eastern Europe depending on the country or region. Perspectives depend on historical experiences and events. 1944 marks the liberation from German occupation – the Red Army is on the move towards Germany and liberates the Baltic states, Belarus and Ukraine, for example. This is followed by the period under Soviet control. Some nations lose their independence again.
The series History in Conflict. 1944 – A Year between Fronts aims to focus on the controversial memory of liberation, ongoing occupation and the associated political and social changes.
From January to July 2024, we would like to look at different locations in the year 1944 – in six events international guests will address the historical contexts as well as the changes and conflicts in memory.
On the event evenings, the museum exhibitions are open until the event begins at 7 pm.
with Prof Dr Jörg Ganzenmüller (University of Jena)
and Dr Andrea Zemskov-Züge (OWEN Berlin e.V.)
On 27 January 1944, after 900 days, the siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) by the Wehrmacht came to an end. To this day, the memory of hunger, cold, death and survival remains etched in the memory of the Russian population. Whereas in the Soviet era, the memory centred on enduring the siege, stylised as a heroic struggle, in more recent times it is the human tragedies and sacrifices. There are 470,000 dead buried in the Piskaryovskoye cemetery alone, with the total number of victims estimated at over one million. The surviving “Blokadniki” are still held in the highest esteem to this day.
To mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the Leningrad Blockade, a review of the historical reappraisal of the event will be organised. The event aims to draw a line from the memory of the event during the Soviet Union to the examination of the Leningrad Blockade in contemporary Russia.
with Dr Christoph Dieckmann (Frankfurt/Main, University of Haifa)
and Dr Gintarė Malinauskaitė (Institute of Lithuanian History, Vilnius)
In the course of 1944, the Germans withdrew from Lithuania, which they had occupied in the summer of 1941. The Soviet Union, which had annexed Lithuania on the basis of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1940 and had been driven out of the country in 1941, now occupied Lithuania for the second time. What did the military events of 1944 mean for different groups in Lithuania? How did the Lithuanian, Polish and Jewish populations react?
In his keynote speech, Dr Christoph Dieckmann will outline the complicated situation in Lithuania in the course of 1944, before and after the German withdrawal. In the subsequent discussion with Dr Gintarė Malinauskaitė, moderated by Dr Babette Quinkert, questions of history and memory that are still relevant today will be discussed.
with Prof Dr Christoph A. Rass (University of Osnabrück)
and Dr Aliaksandr Dalhouski (Leonid Levin History Workshop, Minsk)
In March 1944, the Wehrmacht’s 9th Army – with the participation of all its subordinate divisions as well as a special commando of the SD’s “Einsatzgruppen” – deported around 50,000 civilians from the entire “army area” in Belarus, including many sick and elderly people, mothers with small children and people with disabilities, to a camp complex west of the village of Ozarichi and left them there as a “human shield” in its own “frontline levelling”. The Wehrmacht’s aim was to eliminate “useless eaters” and at the same time leave behind a humanitarian disaster for the Red Army in order to slow down its advance. With the deportations at Ozarichi, the Wehrmacht’s warfare in Belarus entered a new, systematically inhumane phase of radicalisation. The “Army Group Centre” intended to repeat similar operations everywhere along the “front”.
Red Army soldiers liberated the survivors a few days after the German retreat and cared for the victims. It is estimated that around 9,000 people died during or as a result of this war crime. In Belarus, the memory of the deportations is still very much alive today.
Aliaksandr Dalhouski and Christoph Rass have been researching German war crimes in Belarus together for many years and produced the film “Ozarichi 1944” together with students in 2006. In a lecture, the two historians will talk about the deportations, the significance of this war crime for Germany and Belarus and the culture of remembrance in both societies.
with PD Dr Kai Struve (University Halle)
and Liana Blikharska (Memorial Museum for Totalitarian Regimes “Territory of Terror”, Lviv)
For Lviv and western Ukraine, the change from German to Soviet rule in 1944 did not mean an end to war and violence. They continued to dominate the lives of the people in this region in the years that followed. There were three main contexts for this: 1) the fight of the UPA, the “Ukrainian Insurgent Army”, against the renewal of Soviet rule and the Soviet suppression of this resistance; 2) the forced “repatriation” of Poles and Ukrainians in both directions across the newly established Polish-Soviet border; 3) the Polish-Ukrainian conflict over the affiliation of the border regions. The lecture will outline the various contexts of violence and their prehistory and will also examine the significance of the associated historical experiences up to the present day.
with Dr. Kristiane Janeke (Centre for Military History and Social Sciences of the Bundeswehr in Potsdam)
and Dr. Astrid Sahm (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik. German Institute for International and Security Affairs)
Malyj Trostenez, on the outskirts of Minsk in Belarus, was the largest mass extermination site on the territory of the German-occupied Soviet Union from 1941 to 1944. Between 1942 and the liberation of the camp in June 1944, tens of thousands of people – mainly Jews, but also Soviet prisoners of war and political prisoners – were cruelly murdered there. The site and the crimes committed at Malyj Trostenez are little known. Today, a memorial complex is located here, which was inaugurated in two stages in 2015 and 2018. Its creation was supported by an international memorial initiative involving social actors from Belarus, Germany, the Czech Republic and Austria. The design of the memorial complex plays an important role in the current debates on how to deal with the past in Belarus today. Both the historical reappraisal and the design and handling of the memorial site are sometimes the subject of controversial debate.
The event will focus on the history of the Malyj Trostenez camp on the one hand, and on current developments surrounding the memorial site and today’s culture of remembrance on the other.
with Wiesław Wysok (Deputy Director of the Majdanek State Museum)
and Prof Dr Stephan Lehnstaedt (Touro University Berlin)
On 22 July 1944, the German camp staff and the last evacuation transport with over 1,000 prisoners left the Lublin-Majdanek concentration and extermination camp. Majdanek was thus the first large Nazi camp to be dissolved. After the arrival of the Red Army and Polish military units, shocking evidence of the crimes committed by the Germans was discovered: ashes, bones, human remains and the bodies of almost 80,000 murdered or deceased prisoners, mainly Jews and Poles. The tragic dimension of the site was also made clear by the traces of the crimes that have been preserved: gas chambers, crematoria, prisoner barracks and hundreds of thousands of shoes. At the end of July, numerous residents of Lublin and relatives of those murdered travelled to Majdanek to commemorate the victims. Less than a month after the camp was closed, an initiative was launched to establish a museum. Majdanek thus became the world’s first concentration camp memorial, which began its work in autumn 1944.
In addition to the historical events, the event will focus on remembering and commemorating the victims. 22 July is the official day of remembrance. This year marks the 80th anniversary of the dissolution of the camp and the 80th anniversary of the founding of the memorial.
History in Conflict. Memories of the Second World War in Eastern Europe
History as a political instrument played a role even before the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine. Controversies about the interpretation of history are part of modern societies. In Eastern Europe, they have been fought out particularly fiercely in the decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union. For too long, the guidelines of the Moscow centre had claimed dominance. All the states that have asserted their independence since the end of the 1980s or have broken away from Russian dominance now distance themselves from the Soviet narratives in different forms and with varying degrees of severity. It is not uncommon for historical politics and cultures of memory to be the stage for the resolution of social conflicts.
In the series “History in Conflict“, the Museum Berlin-Karlshorst explores some facets of these debates and controversies.
The event language is German. Simultaneous translation will be provided for two events.
Panel: Jan C. Behrends (Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam, University of Frankfurt/Oder / Félix Krawatzek (Centre for Eastern European and International Studies, Berlin)
