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In this article we argue that the EU suffers from autoimmunity: a self-harming protection strategy. Drawing on Derrida's political understanding of autoimmunity, we contend that the root of this malfunction lies in the EU's own b/ordering and othering policies, which are intended to immunise the foundational ethos of the EU. For this purpose, we dissect the EU border regime into three linked b/ordering mechanisms: the pre-borders of paper documents that regulate from afar the mobility of the people from visa-obliged countries; the actual land borders often consisting of iron gates and fences regulating mobility on the spot; and the post-border in the form of waiting/detention camps that segregate and enclose the undocumented migrants after entry. We make clear how this discriminatory b/ordering and othering regime has led to a recurrent drawing of ever less porous, inhumane and deadlier borders. Such thanatopolitics finds itself at odds with the humanist values that the EU is supposed to uphold, particularly cross-border solidarity, openness, non-discrimination and human rights. We argue that the EU b/ordering regime has turned fear of the non-EUropean into an increasingly unquestioned – even 'commonsensical' – anxiety that has become politically profitable to exploit by extreme nationalistic and EUrosceptic parties. The core of the EU's autoimmunity that we want to expose lies within this irony: in its attempt to protect what it considers meaningful, the EU has unleashed an autoimmune disorder that has turned the EU into its own most formidable threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four Years in a Red Coat: The Loveday Internment Camp Diary of Miyakatsu Koike: By Miyakatsu Koike. Just to grasp Koike's mobility during the war demands that we explore an international node between Japan, Australia, and the Dutch East Indies. Instead he was transferred to Australia in a "hell" ship, I Cremer i , by an agreement with the Dutch East Indies government to transfer internees to Australia. [Extracted from the article]

On 5 May 1957, Leopold Löwenheim passed away in a Berlin hospital following a short but severe illness, unnoticed by the community of mathematical logicians who believed that he had perished in a Nazi concentration camp in or shortly after 1940 (the year of publication in the Journal of Symbolic Logic of his last paper before the end of World War II). The 50th anniversary of his death seems an appropriate date for the posthumous publication of a paper that was supposed to appear in Fundamenta Mathematicae in 1939, the galley proofs of which Löwenheim had already seen and corrected when German troops invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. Löwenheim managed to save the proofs through the War, despite the loss of most of his possessions during the bombing of Berlin in 1943 and 1944. By another lucky chance, a copy of the proofs survived in the present author's possession, when the originals were lost during a flat clearing in Berlin as part of the estate of Johannes Teichert (1904-1994), Löwenheim's step-son, when his widow moved into a nursing-home in May 1999. Later, I will expand these short remarks slightly but seize the present opportunity to resume (and in some places add to) the extant data on Löwenheim's life and writings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 2021 sentence condemned a retired Major of the Military Police of Minas Gerais on charges of genocide against the Krenak people. Between 1969 and 1979, that state’s Military Police established two prisons of exception. The sentence is crucial on the grounds of the enormous human and cultural damage endured by the indigenous peoples of Brazil during the Military Dictatorship of 1964–1985, as established by the Brazilian Truth Commission. This paper discusses an archaeological and anthropological approach to the conditions prevailing at these prisons and attested by some of its survivors. By addressing their form of internment, the slave labour and torture committed at them, this paper will discuss the extent to which such prisons can be considered concentration camps. This article on their archaeological study hopes to make a useful contribution to the archaeology of repression and resistance to that dictatorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the memory activism of three survivors of the Auschwitz resistance and explores the ways in which they linked fascism and genocide to economic exploitation. By doing so, our paper excavates a leftist-antifascist paradigm of postwar memory that waned with the advent of contemporary Holocaust culture. We analyse the memoirs of Oszkár Betlen, Bruno Baum, and Hermann Langbein, members of the international communist movement before, during, and after the Second World War. For these authors, calls to remember Auschwitz were inseparable from a struggle for social change in the present, and their memory practice was never restricted to writing. Therefore, our paper places their memoirs into the wider context of their political-organizational work, and shows that their efforts to commemorate Auschwitz responded to some pressing issues of their time, including the re-militarization and NATO-membership of the Federal Republic, reparations, amnesty and reintegration of former Nazis, and war crimes trials. Importantly, all these issues were intertwined with what they regarded as capitalist restoration and a looming resurgence of fascism. Our paper argues that the so-called economic case was central to their postwar campaigning because they believed that economic exploitation was central to fascism and had wide-ranging implications for postwar societies as well. Furthermore, we challenge the prevailing view on antifascism by demonstrating that for these authors the economic aspect of fascism did not eclipse the genocidal character of fascism and the specifically Jewish experience of it. In contrast to some Marxist historians, they did not see genocidal policies as merely derivative or secondary either. Rather, these leftist-antifascists commemorated Auschwitz in ways which regarded economic exploitation and genocide as interrelated and constitutive aspects of fascism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the experiences of Jewish right-wing underground members who were imprisoned in detention camps in Eritrea, Sudan, and Kenya during the British Mandate rule over Palestine from October 1944 to July 1948. These 459 detainees endured harsh conditions and isolation, after being exiled without trial and denied the ability to appeal to a court. Their primary means of communication with the outside world was by correspondence. An extensive collection of letters penned by these detainees to their loved ones and to national and international institutions is housed in Israeli archives, particularly within the Jabotinsky Institute. Additionally, original newspapers and a comprehensive book compiled during their time in the camp are among the preserved materials. Remarkably, these ego documents have seen limited use in academic research. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive depiction of the isolated microcosm of culture, education, struggle, and resilience cultivated by these young Jewish men despite their uncertain condition and lack of control over their fate. This analysis relies on letters composed in real-time, subject to military censorship as well as self-restraint, to avoid causing distress to their families. These letters constitute a valuable historical resource that sheds light on a lesser-known case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the intersection of historical remembrance and the ethical imperative of 'never again' in shaping a peaceful future, drawing on the context of Council of Europe's commitment to history education. It believes in the pivotal role of understanding the past for fostering democratic values. However, the paper critically examines the limitations of the widely embraced 'never again' ethic, transcending mere historical knowledge. The author, working in a post-conflict setting, discusses the complexities of transforming this ethic into an empirical tool. By delving into examples such as refugee camps during the 2015 crisis and ICE detention camps, the paper highlights the challenges of applying 'never again' in new political and social realities. While acknowledging the limitations of relying solely on history education, the paper suggests the need for multidisciplinary approaches and emphasizes competencies beyond historical thinking in shaping a promising future. The conclusion calls for engagement across sectors and broader knowledge incorporation in teacher training programs. Overall, the paper navigates the intricate relationship between historical awareness, ethical imperatives, and the practical challenges of preventing atrocities in the contemporary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migration infrastructures have usually been identified with stable socio-material arrangements controlling migration (e.g. airports and detention camps), stressing highly stratified power geometries and hierarchies. Recent debates about arrival infrastructures, however, have highlighted the informal, ephemeral and improvisational character of 'bottom-up' infrastructures. Departing from a widened understanding of infrastructure, this paper looks at migrants' businesses as urban infrastructures assembling various kinds of mobilities. In particular, we address small businesses established by Senegalese migrants in Brazil, and Brazilian-owned cafés in Portugal. We approach these businesses as urban infrastructures where different forms of mobilities overlap and interact, exposing various trajectories and scales of circulation. While the businesses in Brazil cater mainly for Senegalese and other migrants' needs (money transfer, ICTs, and job offers), the Brazilian-owned coffee shops in Portugal function as sites of co-working and sociality of tourists, digital nomads, and other urban creatives. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in the cities of São Paulo and Caxias do Sul (Brazil) and in Lisbon (Portugal), this paper makes innovative connections between migration research, mobility studies and urban theory. We discuss the infrastructural production of transnational and local mobilities and how these businesses both result from and facilitate the existence of mobile lifestyles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

About 700 European children are stranded with their mothers in the detention camps in northeast Syria. They are children of European departees who travelled to the Levant after 2012 to join one of the fighting forces against the Syrian regime. Most European countries refuse to repatriate these children because of their parents, who are considered terrorists. This paper investigates the status of these children through the analysis of the political and media-debates and ongoing collaborative ethnographic research in Belgium. We argue that these children reside in a condition of virtual innocence, which is characterized by a continuous interrogation of their social, political, and ontological status as well as their right to life. This condition of virtual innocence also sheds a different light on the state of exception: rather than being expressed through a permanent ban, it becomes manifested through an undecided and pending inclusion into the bios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the history of the Soviet human acclimatization project in the North and Siberia, which spanned from medical experiments in Stalin's forced labor camps to the subsequent wave of industrialization in the region. The author argues that human acclimatization in the North was a settler colonial science project aimed at facilitating Russian administrators and engineers in asserting control over the territory and its resources, while creating a new homogeneous 'indigenous population' in Siberia and the North. This envisioned population, referred to as Homo Polaris by the author, was intended to emerge through a two-way transformation: the adaptation of Indigenous peoples into Soviet ideologies and practices, and the acclimatization of settlers coming from the European part of the country to the Arctic environment. Although the administrators and medical doctors were unable to achieve this biopolitical objective, the complexities and dialogues surrounding these transformations shed light on the late Soviet settler-colonial ideologies and their impact on social life in Siberia from the 1950s to the 1980s. The research is based on a comprehensive analysis of both published and archival works by scholars involved in the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The racial census carried out by the fascist regime on 22 August 1938, represented the first act of discrimination towards the minority Jewish population in Italy. By means of an analysis of newly discovered archive sources regarding the city of Milan, this paper aims to reconstruct the endeavour, retracing the steps and going over the consequences. Furthermore, it aims to reconstruct the characteristics pertaining to the Jewish community in Milan. The census was an abrupt turning point both in the lives of individuals and in the history of the Kingdom of Italy. As the first collection of data based on the criteria of belonging to the so-called Jewish race, the census of 1938 was the preliminary and introductory act for what would be the largest persecutory action officially taken by the Fascist regime towards the Italian Jewish population. This was enacted through the royal decree law no. 1728 on 17 November 1938. The data collected for the census, were used by the fascist regime in order to have a general overview of the Italian Jewish population, as well as to put in place all persecutory operations leading to arrests and deportations to Nazi extermination camps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how two Wyoming community newspapers—the Cody Enterprise and the Powell Tribune—covered the internment of more than 6,000 Japanese Americans at the Heart Mountain relocation camp from the day the announcement was made that the camp would be constructed to Heart Mountain's official opening in August 1942. Journalists for the Tribune and Enterprise clearly shied away from the controversial, "unpleasant" aspects of the internment—chief among them, the blatant violation of the internees' civil rights. The newspapers relied on sources who conveyed the "official," positive version of events. Journalists for these papers endeavored to build what Schudson would call "a community of sentiment"2 about the coming of the camp. They conveyed the impression that the internees would become another significant community group. They humanized the internees by running photos of them happily arriving at Heart Mountain, and, later, of the milestones in their lives. Editors and reporters for the Tribune and the Enterprise were indeed acting as "guard dogs" for local officials, but the threat, as they identified it, was not the Japanese Americans, or their allegedly nefarious activities; it was that this new local business might fail. Such an approach is not surprising in light of the support of community development shown in the preceding few decades by the editors of both papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although cinema took up the issue of sport in Nazi concentration and extermination camps as early as 1963 with the film The Boxer and Death, it was only in 2013 that Jacques Ouaniche released the film Victor Young Perez, a film completely dedicated to the career of the French boxer of the same name, who was crowned world boxing champion in 1931 and deported to Auschwitz in October 1943. Rooted in cultural history, this paper looks at the political context and cultural universe, as well as the memorial dynamics and conflicts of interest against which the film was produced in France. Resuscitated in an article of L'Équipe in 1992, the trajectory of Young Perez only found its way into the memory of French sport at the beginning of the 2000s when the 'duty to remember' flooded public space. The paper also intends to understand why Jacques Ouaniche's biopic enjoyed only moderate success. The dialogue between fiction and reality, the distancing from historical facts and the storyline constitute the main areas explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, very little is known archaeologically about First World War-era internment camps, especially in Canada, where this history was actively erased through the destruction of the Federal Internment records in the 1950s. Archaeologists can play a fundamental role in contributing knowledge where oral and documentary evidence is lacking. This paper focuses on one of Canada's 24 WWI internment camps: the Morrissey Internment Camp. Through GPR survey and excavation, archival records retrieval, and oral histories, the PoW diet is analysed in order to confirm whether it was as poor as many prisoners had claimed. The material record adds a new line of evidence, contributing to a more nuanced perspective that aids in reducing the gaps in this dark facet of Canadian history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Goli Otok (Barren Island) was a site of the master political prison and forced labor camp of the socialist Yugoslavia between 1949 and 1956. The imprisoned, accused of siding with Stalin in the Tito-Stalin political rift, were sent to undergo 'self-managed re-education' through 'socially beneficial labor' in the island's limestone quarries. The inmates were forced to build their own prison out of that very limestone - the first known human dwellings on the previously uninhabited island. They were also often forced to break, crumble and to carry massive stone loads from one place to another and back, with no constructive or productive purpose. However, the labor camp authorities also operated a lucrative business, oriented towards country-wide distribution, and sometimes towards international export of the island's limestone. The quarried stone of the island therefore travelled more widely than its excavators, whose movements were limited to their island-prison. Set at the intersection of labor history and environmental history and drawing on the archival materials of the Yugoslav State Security Service, oral history interviews with the former prisoners, and their published and unpublished written memoirs, this paper examines the interrelations of the prison-island, its stone material, and the prisoners' laboring bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the negotiations for the repatriation of the Japanese residents of New Caledonia who were transferred to Australia for internment after the outbreak of the Asia-Pacific theatre of World War II. It shows that whilst the Japanese residents’ place of origin was New Caledonia, it was deemed instead to be Japan, and they were repatriated to Japan either as part of the Anglo–Japanese civilian exchange of September 1942 or after the cessation of hostilities. The paper also shows that the Australian government had security concerns regarding the Japanese before and during the war but was willing to repatriate the Japanese to New Caledonia after the war should the New Caledonian authorities have been willing to accept them back. The New Caledonian authorities’ decision not to accept the Japanese back in New Caledonia resulted in their repatriation to Japan even though some expressed the wish to return to New Caledonia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Thousands of Spaniards contributed to the defence and the liberation of France as military contractors, legionnaires and soldiers between 1939 and 1945. This paper focuses on three elements of their contributions. First, it investigates the importance of French internment camps for Spanish refugees that became key recruitment grounds for soldiers and labourers. Secondly, it will analyse the importance of the military background Spanish volunteers acquired in both Spanish and French ranks. Thirdly, it will analyse the features of Free French Spanish volunteers and their fighting itineraries as transnational soldiers. Despite its importance, politicians in both France and Spain only recognised Spanish contributions to the French resistance after the Second World War. This is a fourth aspect of the entangled Franco-Spanish history of the Second World War that this article analyses. By incorporating the accounts of French Gaullists, Communists and Spanish Francoists, it demonstrates how the context of the Cold War, which reinforced these interpretations, left little room for the study and commemorative inclusion of these "outsiders". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nazi concentration camps were considered to be the worst humanitarian crisis in the twentieth century and the world believed that this scenario will never happen again. In today's modern world, in the twenty-first century, the Chinese Communist Party has imprisoned millions of indigenous Turkics in concentration camps in which they are being forced to deny their faith, abandon their own culture, and assimilate to Chinese culture as a whole nation. This paper, initially evaluates the development of China and East Turkistan relations and Beijing's policies towards this region. Then, it examines the situation of concentration camps and who is being held captive and what crimes they have committed in the eyes of the Chinese government. Last but not least, it examines how the Chinese dream, nationalist policies, and developments of international politics played an important role in the establishment of these concentration camps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of gender on decisions that military, police, and bureaucrats made in selection of western European Jews for deportation venues, on initial treatment at Auschwitz and death camps, and on survival. Examining data collected and made public by Yad Vashem on 1100 transports carrying more than 550,000 Western European Jews to the east, I find that women comprised a majority on most transports and a disproportionate number of those sent to immediate death at Auschwitz. Patterns of gender composition of transports varied over the course of the war and from country to country in significant and mostly predictable ways. Overall survival rates for men were higher than for women based on transports carrying about 210,000 of the 550,000 people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1941 Australian tabloid journalist Dorothy Gordon Jenner was caught up in the Japanese siege of Hong Kong and was incarcerated in the Stanley Internment Camp. During her internment Jenner kept a clandestine record of daily life written in pencil on Bronco brand toilet paper and kept hidden in the heels of her shoes. To date her fragmented diary and notes have defied analysis. This paper provides a reading of Jenner's personal wartime testimonio through the frame of tabloid journalism to expose how the tabloid genre-Jenner's stock-in-trade as a journalist before the war-became the framework for her personal testimony during World War II. By interpreting Jenner's private diary and notes as testimonio journalism this paper exposes the flow of the tabloid vernacular style of journalism between private and public discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What distinguished Edward R. Murrow's April 1945 concentration camp broadcast was the people of Buchenwald. While other journalists focused on the dead as "dumps of unburied corpses" and the living as "wretched remnants," Murrow described the inmates as people who had lives before their internment. Murrow's work a decade earlier with Jewish professors fired by the Nazi regime helped him sense humanity when others perceived nothing but carnage. Yet, like other correspondents covering the liberation, Murrow never mentioned Jews in his broadcast. Nor had he done much on the plight of Europe's Jews while they were being murdered, broadcasting a single story. Despite his displaced scholars work and his London base, Murrow never fully recognized the extermination of European Jewry as an important news story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeologies of internment present unique challenges and benefits. Myriad aspects of human behaviour that stretch over temporal scales of generations and centuries at other archaeological sites are visible in ephemeral traces of short-term occupation at sites of internment such as prisoner of war (POW)camps; resistance, domination, the structure and scaffolds of authority, agency and identity are created, cast, and discarded into the soil. The paper examines some of these stories from the earth through military prisons of the American Civil War, and the ephemeral archaeology of selected case studies: Camp Lawton, Andersonville, and Johnson's Island. Themes explored are globalization and the intersection of the global at the local in prison camps, resistance, its forms, and function within POW camps; and how resistance intersecting with systems of structural violence within internment camps spurred the development of a masculinity in the 19th century during, and after the American Civil War, different from societal norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, reports have emerged that China operates "political re-education" camps of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. China justified them as a sort of vocational training program to assist Uyghurs in participating in the Chinese economy. In actuality, they are brutal incarceration camps; these forms of 'education' can qualify as torture that perhaps 1.5 million adults have been subjected to, and have led to detaining children of people incarcerated in state-run boarding schools. It is necessary to interrogate the underlying factors that have enabled the Chinese government to open and operate these camps under the guise of education. This paper first examines the impact of the current geopolitical interests of China's Belt & Road Initiative and the historical backgrounds of Xinjiang and the Re-Education through Labour program. It then explains the methods of 'education' taking place within the camps and interrogates China's justifications for building them. This education issue is more about inhibiting Uyghur power than China's claim that the camps are meant to empower Uyghurs to participate in the Chinese labour force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds upon and challenges existing literature regarding the causes of wartime male sexual violence (particularly Sivakumaran's concept of "homosexualization"). The author argues that norms about sexuality and the intended audience of violence motivate male sexual violence in three ways. First, perpetrators choose to express power over the individual victim through the weaponization of masculinity, bodily integrity and/or sexual identity. Second, sexual violence can be used to reaffirm group belonging and hetero-masculinity among perpetrators. Third, sexual violence sends a message to a larger community or nation regarding supremacy and power hierarchies. Two examples (Abu Ghraib and Nazi concentration camps) are presented to illustrate the framework's concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Camp Lawton is a Confederate camp for Union PoWs in Georgia, USA. Built in 1864, inhabited for six weeks, and abandoned in advance of Sherman's march to the sea, it is the focus of an ongoing research project. One of the key questions, yet unresolved, concerning Civil War POW camps is the lack of PoW access to essential supplies. Historical debates rage over the intentionality of these depravations, with a recurring argument asserting a universal privation, for guards and PoWS. The archaeology of internment camps can end this debate. Presented here are interpretations from recent fieldwork via an unlikely source: the machine-cut nail, analysed as a proxy in the absence of traditional evidence of subsistence and supply. Present in large numbers in PoW and guard areas, but clearly not architectural, this paper explores a narrative where nails, and the purpose for which they were put to, were not wanting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of investigations on reinforced concrete structures present in the former Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. Field inspection employing the non-destructive method of reinforcement potential measurement according to the ASTM-C 876-15 standard, followed by laboratory investigations performed on genuine historic reinforced concrete samples collected from the former Auschwitz camp, allowed assessment of the actual condition of this 70-year-old construction material. Electrochemical potential measurements allowed mapping of the regions characterized by enhanced reinforcement corrosion risk and the regions of its immunity. The composition of concrete, water absorbency, content of detrimental salts, and degree and profile of carbonation as well as mechanical properties were evaluated. Results revealed the most common and probable mechanism responsible for degradation of the reinforced concrete structures in the former Auschwitz camp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1962, one year after the outbreak of the colonial war in Angola, the Portuguese military forces devised and tried to establish a concentration camp in the northern district of Zaire. This attempt failed to gather sufficient support among metropolitan civil servants, who preferred seemingly softer techniques of population control, such as village-building and resettlement plans. The case represents the first ever documented evidence of a relation between penal concentration and rural development policies in Portuguese Africa. There are competing accounts today on the structural origins and conjunctural aims of the Portuguese policy of population removal, regrouping and surveillance in Angola, mainly because resettlement plans and concentration camps became analytically ambiguous during the last fifteen years of the Portuguese colonial rule. This paper explores this ambiguity by showing that resettlement techniques were linked to penal reforms of the early 1950s. By studying the initial and subsequent plans of rural reordering proposed for the region of Zaire and by following the history of the first native prison experiment of aldeamento (in the penal colony of Damba of Malanje), I argue that counter-insurgency village-building in Angola corresponded to a form of 'developmental repression'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seeking to critically engage with German post-war politics of memory through a study of material culture, this paper examines the political implications of absence for archaeological work. More specifically, it confronts the problem of the lacuna of the archive of the Holocaust and explores how we can productively engage the archival absences that animate the present. Introducing first results from archaeological excavations at a former forced labour camp at Tempelhof airfield in Berlin, Germany, I discuss how archaeology, by investigating what remains after the Holocaust, may allow us to manifest absence, loss and historical silence. Analysing the role of objects of memory in storytelling and history writing, I also lay out how tender a task an archaeological study of the Nazi past is, pointing out where our work may risk to misappropriate history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on a long-term research project about texts written and published between 1946 and 2011 by Italian survivors of the concentration camp Flossenbürg. Even though their authors share the autobiographical experience, the point of departure and the justification of the writing process itself, it is striking how many different results can be observed in the written reconstruction in terms of form and content. Some accounts consist of a basic, chronological reconstruction of the period concerned, while others retrace the entire life (up to the writer’s present day) in which the terrible experience of the camp is a central event but not dealt with in isolation. Only a few authors have extended the simple ‘life chronicle’ to a general reflection on human experience. The aim of this paper is to offer a detailed analysis of these three different types of works, which, beyond the Flossenbürg accounts, may also serve as a key to a better understanding of written testimonies in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theorists have argued that the "attempt to comprehend" the genocidal event represented by Auschwitz has "defeated the intellects of countless men and women". Memorials at Auschwitz and other concentration camps such as Dachau and Buchenwald, and to a certain extent those outside of Europe, such as Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek in Cambodia, are attempts to call attention to these atrocities in the hope of preventing the repetition of their like. Yet these projects, like all historical monuments and memorials, face the problem of a certain coldness and indifference caused by historical distance, consumerist culture and the seemingly abstract nature of historical images and documents. Concentration camp memorials are not entirely immune from these problems. However, in their use of an embodied semiotics invoking the visitor's own body as a direct participant in immersive environments, sensory surfaces and displays, these memorials engage - not unproblematically - in a project to realize this history in visceral and concrete ways. This paper examines the semiotic strategies of the concentration camp as a technique of "embodying" suffering that is intended to counter the dissipation of affect in a media-saturated consumerist era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses an art installation by Giuseppe Penone called Sculture di linfa, which explores the relationship between nature and culture through the use of tree trunks and leather sheets imprinted with tree bark. The artist focuses on the sensory experience rather than symbolic meaning. The article also mentions Georges Didi-Huberman's exploration of the significance of bark, particularly in relation to the birch trees at Birkenau concentration camp. Gerhard Richter's response to the Holocaust is discussed, highlighting his use of painting to capture and convey the trauma. Richter's Birkenau series, displayed at the Alte Nationalgalerie, invites viewers to reflect on the unimaginable horror of the Holocaust through the metaphor of the mirror. The text also notes the association between the word "birch" and the color red-brown in Richter's work, and mentions that the Birkenau cycle is permanently displayed in a museum near Auschwitz. [Extracted from the article]

Thousands of testimonies were collected in the immediate post-war period from child survivors of the Holocaust. These testimonies tell us much about the children's Holocaust experience and about society's attitude to child survivors. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of two such testimonies on the backdrop of historical research of their setting and context. Through our analysis of two children's testimonies given in the Aschau DP Children's Camp, we demonstrate that it is crucial to explore the immediate context in which testimonies were given, because of its strong influence upon their content and structure. In fact, our research shows that the contemporary context enters into the very fabric of the testimonies. No analysis, therefore, is complete without an inquiry into this crucial aspect. The two testimonies were chosen because they make up a distinct subgroup within a larger collection of testimonies that were given concurrently and, therefore, they constitute each other's immediate context. This paper also demonstrates the indispensability of a multidisciplinary analysis that draws upon elements from the fields of historical, literary and linguistic scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper concerns eight women's testimonies produced over a period of some 50 years, which describe a protest about meat rations at Brandfort concentration camp in November 1901, during the 1899–1902 South African War. The focus here is not the ‘event itself’, which cannot now be recovered except in its archival or documentary forms, but on the subsequent re/telling of this incident, and on the politicised, (proto-) nationalist content and tone of the Brandfort protest testimonies. While proto-nationalism is present from the earliest extant testimony, the development of this is traced over time, showing how the later testimonies evince a strongly triumphalist nationalist tone. The retrospectively inscribed testimonies of the protest are examined to show how, over time, the story of the Brandfort protest became universalised, retold well away from specificities of time and place. If nationalism depends on the creation of ‘stories that find their place’, then it was partly through the construction and repetition of what Van Heyningen has called ‘costly mythologies’ about women's concentration camp experiences that Afrikaner national unity was achieved. This also supports Bradford’s important claim that the 1899–1902 war regendered Afrikaner nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the history of journalism of the Japanese internment camps during the World War II. It discusses the publishing operations of the newspapers including Sentinel, Outpost and Tule Lake. It recounts on the various events wherein journalism practitioners and their readers existed within an environment that is devoid of individual freedom and civil liberties. It explores on the experiences of the journal editors and publishers under the mandate and authority of War Relocation Authority (WRA).

This article presents a paper, which discusses the differential adjustment to internment camp life. This paper considers some factors that predispose prisoners in an internment camp to differential forms of adjustment. The observations, lasting for a period of over two years, were made on a group of Italian civilian internees deported from England to Canada in the first part of 1940 during World War II. When Germany invaded the Low Countries in the spring of that year, the English government had most male enemy aliens residing in England interned. After brief temporary allocations, the prisoners were sorted out and some were deported. One group of 317 Italian civilians was brought to Canada and assigned to Camp "X" in Quebec. According to the original plan, this group should have been composed of unmarried men under 30. However, in the great confusion of the moment, a number of individuals were included who did not correspond to these qualifications. Most of the population was between 22 and 35 years old.

This article attempts to answer the key question regarding to what extent the Spanish population knew about the Holocaust. To accomplish this, the paper analyzes a significant chapter in history, namely, the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet troops in January 1945. Thanks to the analysis of a wide repertoire of Spanish newspapers published during the same year, it can be seen how the Spanish population was informed about this event within the context of Francoist dictatorship. The analysis of these pieces of news by means of different media of the Spanish press of that time will enable us to answer a series of questions which have not been answered yet in the Spanish historiography such as: how were the accounts of the concentration camps, gas chambers, death marches and other atrocities committed against the prisoners? Why did it take such a long time for the Spanish press to publish the news which had been circulating in the foreign press? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How could the Holocaust happen – and why did the surrounding world not react? During the first decades after World War II, in Sweden as in many other countries, a common answer was "we did not know." The argument is still used. However, today we know that testimonies about the mass murder in concentration camps were spread through both diplomatic channels and international news reports. To what extent did this information also reach the Swedish citizens, living in a neutral nation? In this article I present two studies. One study analyses Swedish news about Jews from January 1933 to the end of May 1945. The results show an interest in "Jewish questions" throughout the 1930s, culminating in 1938 (Kristallnacht), but with a decreased attention thereafter and with very limited reporting in 1940 and 1941. A second study analyses articles about the extermination camps in Germany and Poland in 1938–1945 and shows that bits and pieces of news information can be found, but the publications are at the same time limited in facts and restricted in coverage. Information control by Swedish authorities and self-censorship contributed to the silencing of the German war crimes and the normalisation of "not knowing." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a momentous event in Santiago, Chile, on 10 December 2007. On that day an infamous torture and extermination centre known as Londres 38 was for the first time opened to the public. By the end of the day much more had been exposed than the echoing and empty rooms. After examining the context in which Londres 38 may be placed in the history of the dictatorship, we consider the events of that memorable day in 2007. We explore and follow the tensions so unexpectedly expressed by the colectivos involved in the long campaign to have the building opened. Lastly we return to the building to discover how the mourners have chosen to present the building to visitors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Three practice-based investigations discussed in this essay—Razing Manzanar II, States of Exception, and Palimpsest—correlate two seemingly separate conditions of invisibility. One is invisibility produced through the making and unmaking of spaces of internment or detention called forth through governmental utterances. The other is hidden labour, specifically related to architecture and built environments. These performance-installations reflect upon government-mandated, and now-demolished, camps and the labour occurring there. The sites of study include World War II-era Japanese American internment camps in the American West, where interned citizens wove camouflage for the US Army, and the Centre d'Identification de Vincennes (CIV) in Paris used to detain French Algerian labourers during their war of independence. Most traces of the Japanese American camps are now invisible—razed long ago—but are acknowledged by government. The camps situated within the Paris city limits are also invisible, but not simply by erasure; they are obfuscated by government obstacles to locating them, with the CIV's whereabouts, the city's largest intentional camp, remaining elusive. While seeking to render sensible, or knowable through the senses, these internment camps, and the camp as a recurrent condition, my practices of installation and performing spatial labour also explore rendering visible otherwise-invisible labour. My labour is architectural, employing the discipline's instruments, such as drawings and models. These labours take cues from Eyal Weizman's Forensic Architecture (2017) and age-old techniques of descriptive geometry and shadow projection. Juxtaposing these concerns problematizes both the now-razed architectures that once disappeared whole populations and (hyper/in)visibility (Kunst 2015) of spatial labour. Performed and installed spatial labours of erasing, obfuscating and teasing out of the shadows are the three modes of rendering the invisible visible I examine in this essay, arguing that the performative nature of the explorations is critical to rendering sensible what the artefacts normally conceal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sobibór Death Camp was established by Nazi SS in the Lublin district of Poland in March 1942, as part of Operation Reinhard. The camp was shut down in 1943 after a prisoner uprising. In post-war memory discourses of the Holocaust, public awareness of Sobibór remained comparatively less than that of other sites of killing in Poland. This paper aims to provide an overview of the impact that the initial post-war treatment of the site had on the public awareness of Sobibór, whilst following the earlier stages of commemoration at the site, and how these developments reflect the wider debates of Polish Holocaust memory. It seeks to highlight the success of the most recent archaeological excavations which began in 2007, and the 2013 plans for a new museum and memorial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contends that new cultures of military professionalism were crucial to the emergence of the concentration camp as a social phenomenon in the late 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century. It uses an analysis of the interaction between professional military culture and the process of war-fighting to provide a better understanding of the origins of the camp. Military professionalism, despite important national differences, took instrumental rationality as a core value. This produced a willingness by soldiers to take responsibility for organizing civilian populations on a macro-social scale. In each of four case studies, clearing the population from the rural areas in a 'scorched earth' response to guerilla activity led to the development of the camps. The article argues that this approach has more explanatory adequacy than those based on theories of genocide, biopower, exceptional states, racial ideology, or rational choice. The paper suggests that a major way in which the camps of 1896-1907 were linked to mid 20th century camps was through a global diffusion of the concept, via new forms of print media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, an overdeterminist value-theoretic and class-based approach is used to intervene in the discussions of ecological sustainability. It is argued that the search in nature for ecological principles to guide society/nature relations is epistemologically suspect. Ecological problems in capitalism are inseparably articulated with the process of extracting surplus value. Moreover, due to their adverse impacts, they instigate struggles over the appropriation of nature that shape the possibility of sustainable development. This analysis suggests that capitalism may be ecologically sustainable, but that is by no means given. It is argued that scientific research and technology development in capitalism, so often presented as a solution, could create new ecological risks. The greening of capitalism is contradictory and socially unjust. Socialism can be expected to be preferable to capitalism on a number of social grounds, including environmental considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concentration camps have, left deep scars on the landscape of Europe. They are the physical testaments to the Nazi ideals of racial superiority and their approach to annihilating the Jewish Race. Despite the negative connotations associated with the camps, several have become major tourist 'attractions'. It is suggested that approximately six million visitors each year visit six of the major museums and former camps connected with the Holocaust. At many of the sites there is, however, little or no interpretation. In this respect, this paper discusses and contrasts the developed site at Terezin and the largely ignored site at Lety, both located in the Czech Republic. Terezin's importance is related to its notorius history as a concentration camp which incarcerated Jews, following the Nazi occupation of the Czech lands. Terezin is, however, now a significant tourist and visitor attaraction receving more than 250, 000 visitors per year. In contrast, the camp at Lety was intended for the internment of 'anti-social' Roma from Bohemia, and around 1, 300 prisoners passed through it. Minimal interpretation exists at this site today. It is underdeveloped, shows limited investment and its site and buildings have been covered and replaced with a large agricultural plant. This paper will suggest that there are a number of reasons for the varying levels of development at these sites beyond the obvious difference related to whether or not the original buildings are extant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the reflection of cultural identity conflict in Japanese American internment camp newspapers during World War II. Discussion on the suggested approach to studying cultural identity change; Information on identity crisis experienced by the Japanese Americans inside internment camps; Examination of the newspapers written and edited by Japanese Americans while they were detained; Discussion on the results of examined media contents and their implication on the study of cultural identities.

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In Croatia, the war of symbols and the rise of hate speech has been manifested most prominently through Za dom spremni ("Ready for the Homeland"); the official salute of the WWII fascist quisling-state the Independent State of Croatia. The case that triggered a broad public dispute occurred in November 2016, when a memorial plaque containing the inscribed salute was installed near the WWII concentration camp Jasenovac by radical right-wing politicians and war veterans. As a consequence of being intertwined with the controversial legacy of WWII and the 1990s Croatian War of Independence, the salute on the plaque gave rise to an enclosed meaning-making sphere characterized by the invocation of existing cultural texts and the creation of new ones, the reinforcement of the us-them boundary, and the strengthening of existing taboos. In line with the abovementioned, the overarching aim of the study is to place the Croatian WWII Ustaša salute into a broader theoretical meaning-making framework while demonstrating the importance of cultural functions of the salute and nationalistically fueled hate speech more widely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital technologies are revolutionizing the way we study and understand history. Historical sources and material evidence are increasingly being transformed into digital objects and integrated into larger databases, offering new ways of researching history in the digital age. This article reviews dominant practices that deal with new forms of historiography. It does so by offering digital curatorial practices and outlines a new methodological concept of digital visual history. For that purpose, the article explores a particularly challenging test case of historical visual sources, which not only had a lasting effect on the collective historical imagination but has also increasingly turned digital: the difficult visual heritage of the Holocaust. Highlighting significant aspects of the afterlife of these visual sources, the article uses as an example the digital infrastructure developed in the framework of the EU Horizon 2020 project 'Visual History of the Holocaust: Rethinking Curation in the Digital Age' (VHH) (2019–2023) that aims at (re)contextualizing Allied atrocity records as relational and migrating images. In doing so, the article demonstrates how, through the combination of historiographic practices of curation and digital technologies, the visual heritage of past events is revealed as dynamic and interconnected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the differing representations of the history of concentration camp brothels. It examines how two specific sites of memory, Ravensbrück Gedenkstätte and Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum have taken dichotomous approaches in whether to explore this difficult and marginal experiences of around two hundred women who were forced to serve in prisoner camp brothels. Building on research visits to both sites in 2013, it evaluates and argues that differing national sensitivities, roles the topographies play in memory and history and the pressures of visitor numbers to the sites are fundamental in these juxtaposing representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]