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.

Video recording of the event

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.

Video recording of the event

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.

Further information will follow shortly

with Wiesław Wysok (Deputy Director of the Majdanek State Museum)
and N.N.

Further information will follow shortly

Keynote: Irina Sherbakova (Memorial International)

Panel: Jan C. Behrends (Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam, University of Frankfurt/Oder / Félix Krawatzek (Centre for Eastern European and International Studies, Berlin)

Recording of the event

Keynote: Gints Apals (Latvian Museum of Occupation, Riga)

Panel: Marek Tamm (Tallinn University)

(Simultanious translation in English/German.)

Recording of the event

Keynote: Tetiana Pastushenko (Kyiv Academy of Sciences, University of Heidelberg)

Panel: Janna Keberlein (University of Düsseldorf)

Recording of the event

Keynote: Iryna Kashtalian (University of Bremen)

Panel: Anke Hilbrenner (University of Düsseldorf) / Felix Ackermann (FernUniversität Hagen)

Recording of the event

Keynote: Georgiy Kasianov (University of Lublin)

Panel: Oleksandr Lysenko (Kyiv Academy of Sciences) / Franziska Davies (University of Munich)

(Simultanious translation in Ukrainian/German.)

Recording of the event

Keynote: Tatiana Timofeeva (University of Frankfurt/Oder)

Panel: Tatiana Zhouzhenko (Centre for East European and International Studies) / Susanne Schattenberg (University of Bremen)

Recording of the event