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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]

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]

On a warm summer afternoon in late May 1945, eight recently liberated Jewish Holocaust survivors gave their first concert on the hospital lawn of Bavaria’s St. Ottilien Monastery. After accepting seven new members, the ensemble soon became known as the Ex-Concentration Camp Orchestra, concertizing throughout the American Zone of Germany between 1945 and 1949. Crafting their performances around the experience of forced displacement by wearing concentration camp uniforms, the musicians performed at the very sites of their trauma, including former concentration camps and Wehrmacht barracks. Through their performances, the Orchestra managed to negotiate the ruined postwar landscape by creating a community of survivors bound by common experiences and traumas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years an historical reappraisal has been carried out of one of the worst crimes – outside of prisons and concentration camps – committed in Germany by the SS and Wehrmacht in the final months of the Second World War: the execution of 208 forced labourers by firing squad in the Arnsberg Forest near Warstein and Meschede (Westphalia, western Germany) by the 'Division for Vengeance' of the SS in March 1945. The use of archaeological research methods allowed us to (1) pinpoint both the scenes of the crimes and the events, (2) recover and classify finds attributed to both the victims and the perpetrators and (3) uncover and record in their historical context concrete finds and features from when the atrocity occurred, the period of the initial burial of the victims by US troops in May 1945 and their exhumation in 1964, with the aim of preserving them for future presentations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argues that the collaboration of society to maintain the warfare state and, possibly, to assure its own destruction is paralleled by the routinization of unimaginable horrors in Nazi concentration camps. Analogies that appear in planning for nuclear war; Consideration of human behavior in the concentration camp; Observation on the arguments that preparation for nuclear war is necessary for reasons of national security.

This article discusses military mobilities and encampment, and associated themes such as dislocation and displacement of people, through the case of a Second World War German military camp in Finnish Lapland. The article describes the camp and its archaeological research and discusses various aspects of the camp and camp life in its particular subarctic ‘wilderness’ setting, framing the discussion within the themes of mobilities and dislocations, and especially their multiple impacts on the German troops and their multinational prisoners-of-war based in the camp. A particular emphasis is put on how mobilities and dislocation – in effect ‘being stuck’ in a northern wilderness – were intertwined and how the inhabitants of the camp coped with the situation, as well as how this is reflected in the different features of the camp itself and the archaeological material that the fieldwork produced. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The record of changes in the environment caused by techno- and anthropopressure is undoubtedly reflected in soil morphology and properties. Scientific information regarding the chemical composition of soils in genocide areas is limited. The aim of this investigation is the assessment of the geochemistry of soils of the German Nazi concentration camp in Stutthof. The Stutthof concentration camp was located on the periphery of the Vistula Spit in northern Poland, and was in operation from 1939 to 1945 during World War II. A total of 65,000 people died as a result of exterminating living conditions as well as executions. Forty-five soil sampling points were selected in various parts of the camp. Total phosphorus, organic matter and arsenic (As), chromium (Cr), copper (Cu), lead (Pb), zinc (Zn), aluminum (Al), iron (Fe) and mercury (Hg) contents were determined. It has been observed that the mean on-site concentrations of all trace elements were generally higher than their background. The reason for enrichment was heavy techno- and anthropopressure caused by extreme density of prisoners during the time when the camp operated. The soils of the German Nazi Stutthof concentration camp have clearly been transformed due to mass killing of a large number of human beings. Such a relation is clearly evidenced by the elevated phosphorus content. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the following questions: how and with the aid of which resources was the memory of forced labour during World War II constructed and recreated in the public space of Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine? How has the perception of the place of forced labourers in the general pantheon of war participants changed? And what kinds of transformations took place in the meaningful emphases and symbolic accretion of images associated with this group of people? The initial focus is on the Soviet version of this memory because some correction must be made to the theory that was formulated in the early 1990s and which gradually acquired normative significance in post-Soviet (including Ukrainian) journalism and scholarly literature: namely, that the history, creativity, and memory of this population group were "forgotten" in the official Soviet version of the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The annihilation of the European Jews, the Holocaust, had in ensuing decades occupied a different place in the collective memory of Scandinavian countries than in other parts of former Nazi dominated Europe. This was due to most Scandinavian Jews, and especially Danish Jews, being rescued from deportation and extermination in the Nazi extermination camps. This made the rescue of the Jews central to the collective memory of the German occupation, and it might explain why the Holocaust was long concealed behind this ‘master narrative’. In more recent years, historical research has advanced a more nuanced view of the Danish rescue in October 1943. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article tells the history of the British musicians, especially composers, who were interned at the camp established by the Germans on the Ruhleben race course near Berlin. Historically Ruhleben is particularly interesting because it became self-governing. Those musicians held at the camp who were later celebrated included Ernest MacMillan, Benjamin J. Dale, Bryceson Treharne, Roland Bocquet, Edgar Bainton, Quentin Morvaren, F. Charles Adler, Carl Fuchs, Leigh Henry, Frederick Keel, Percy Hull, and Edward Clark. Examples of the music written at Ruhleben are discussed. Illustrations are taken from the author's set of the rare camp journal In Ruhleben Camp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early November 1914 the German military authorities ordered the internment of all British male civilians aged between 17 and 55 then still resident in Germany. Over four thousand British subjects were affected by this measure. This article examines the domestic political background to the decision in favour of internment, focusing on the role of public opinion and of competing voices within the German war leadership. It also looks at attempts to negotiate the release and exchange of civilian prisoners after 1914. Internment was supported by the military and by most sections of the middle-class press. While partly a reaction to similar measures against Germans in Britain, it also reflected the government's growing frustration at the failure to achieve victory in the opening months of the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considers the memorial at Ravensbruck, a former Nazi concentration camp in Germany during World War II from 1939 to 1945. Estimates of women and men from seventeen countries who were interned in the concentration camp; Changes to the site in the post German Democratic Republic decade; Representations of women, families and Soviet soldiers at the site of the former concentration camp.