Minecraft is a sandbox game that lets players do nearly anything they can imagine. The open world facilitates adventuring and exploring. The massive catalog of blocks enables creative and artistic builds. The “redstone” mechanics function as a miniature version of electricity and technology with which players experiment. The multi-player compatibility is the icing on the cake: you can partake in all of the above with friends and family. Minecraft’s popularity is obvious, from the (once) small indie game being purchased by Microsoft, its explosion into media and culture, to the latest blockbuster film. Minecraft is a household name—and for good reason. 

The game generates places called “villages.” These villages differ based on the environment you find them and the randomized code of the game itself. Villages have at least five structures. In these structures lie “workstations,” beds, and chests filled with loot. Workstations, structures, and beds all show players that villagers have a flourishing society. In these structures live the inhabitants, known as “villagers.” These villagers allow for trading with the player. Villagers hold different jobs: farmers, for example, trade potatoes for an emerald. The more you trade with these villagers, the more trades you unlock—until the villager hits the rank of “master.” Trading with villagers can be an arduous task, requiring patience, persistence, and access to resources. 

Based on this description alone, one can think of a few ways that players can utilize the mechanics to their advantage. The game expects players to steal from the villages. The game encourages players to take the resources from them. Players feel no reservations about stealing since the game provides no consequences. The current world my friends and I play on is a prime example: most of our beds come from a village which we pillaged. We justify our thievery by saying that the villagers don’t need them. In the game, if a certain percentage of players sleep through the night, the night is skipped. The villagers, then, do not need a bed. The code of Minecraft ties villagers to a certain bed. In order for villagers to have children, extra beds must be available. The lack of beds means the villagers no longer have that tie to the village and cannot repopulate the village. The village right by my friend’s house now lies abandoned. 

You may be asking: “What need have they for repopulating?” In Minecraft, hostile mobs will attack both players and villagers. Hostile mobs—such as zombies and skeletons—spawn in (if night is not skipped). My insistence on sleeping comes from a desire not to be harmed by these hostile mobs, since they can kill players. If one dies to a hostile mob, the player respawns, seeks out their items, and fends off the mobs. Villagers have only one life. When they die, they remain dead. Repopulation is necessary for the continued existence of the villagers. The empty village near my friend’s house serves as a reminder that people lived there before we arrived, before we colonized the surrounding areas. It haunts me. 

As mentioned above, villagers trade loot to players based on their jobs and experience. When I play the game, I tend to lock villagers in their homes for two reasons: (a) They cannot be harmed by hostile mobs if my fellow players do not sleep through the night, and (b) I have constant access to the villagers. I trade with them every day until I get what I want. I tend to “make up” for my offenses by providing extra beds to the village as a sort of quid pro quo “treaty”: if you give me good trades, your population will expand. Here’s another mechanic: if a zombified villager is cured of their zombification, the player receives a discount for all trades with that villager.

The worst example of exploitation of these villagers I have seen requires its own section. Two years ago, one of my roommates made a world with our friends. We logged on a week later to find that one of our friends had built a villager farm. This farm holds two villagers captive in a small space. They stand atop beds and receive food from machines. The villagers, detecting an extra bed nearby, have a child. A minecart picks this child up and holds them until they grow up. The cart takes the villagers past a zombie, infecting and “zombifying” them. The cart shuttles the zombified villager to a curing chamber. Out of the chamber comes a cured villager. The cart escorts the villager to their final resting place: a cage with a workstation. My other roommate said, “I feel like you learn a lot about a person based on how they treat villagers.” After that experience, I wholeheartedly agreed. 

My interest in the treatment of villagers grows each time I play the game. If people are inherently good, would every player want to treat these villagers with respect and compassion? Or, if people are inherently bad, would every player want to exploit these villagers to maximize efficiency and utility? Most people I know lie somewhere in the middle. The language surrounding villagers, however, largely remains derogatory. I hear a constant slew of insults thrown at the villagers for not “behaving”. Players assume themselves to be more developed, creative, and powerful than the simple villagers. 

Perpetrators of extraordinary evil are themselves ordinary people. James Waller wrote, “While the evil of genocide is not ordinary, the perpetrators most certainly are”. What could be more ordinary than playing a video game? This game, meant for relaxation, for entertainment, for friendship-building, itself holds the potential for players to commit acts of violence. I do not believe the game developers intended this potential whilst coding the game and its various updates. The question “How can ordinary people commit acts of extraordinary evil?” seemed to me an odd one to ask. Everything I witnessed in this pixelated sandbox game illustrates exactly how ordinary people can commit evil acts. The general culture of cruelty explains the treatment of villagers by players. A culture of cruelty “helps [perpetrators] initiate, sustain, and cope with their extraordinary evil” by simultaneously rewarding and normalizing said evil. Rationalization, group beliefs, and moral disengagement allow players to commit the acts they do while reducing their level of responsibility. Even in my writing, I constantly referred to the villagers with the impersonal “it” pronoun instead of “they” as I tend to do with other video game characters. I understand that connecting people playing video games to perpetrators of mass violence seems odd, but I feel this connection bears significance. If people commit acts of violence in games with no prompt or order, is it so hard to believe that people could commit acts of violence in real life under group prompts and orders? 

January 25, 2025: Elon Musk, high tech innovator, multi-billionaire, controller of a massive social media empire, and close confidant and advisor to the new US president Donald Trump sent a supportive video to a pre-election party gathering of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a right-wing populist party. Parts of the AfD have been categorized as radical right and anti-democratic by the German Intelligence Agencies, and a party leader was recently sentenced in criminal court for the use of Nazi language and symbols. Musk (himself with at least the appearance of a Hitler salute) expressed strong support when he told those gathered that their country placed “too much of a focus on past guilt.” Earlier, Musk had expressed praise for the AfD, and he recently engaged in a supportive conversation with its leader Alice Weidel on his platform X. 

Musk’s plea to Germans resonates with his master’s appeal to Americans: “Make America Great Again,” a message that implies forgetting about the dark sides of this country’s own history. Americans should take notice: demands to forget about evil in German and American societies go hand in hand.

Such demands of course fly in the face of George Santayana’s famous words that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” They fly in the face of President Franklin D. Roosevelt hopes and Justice Robert Jackson’s words in his opening statements at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg: the trial should document the unbelievable atrocities Germany had committed with witnesses under oath and all the written documents so posterity can never doubt. Musk’s demands are an offense against the US (and other nations’) soldiers who risked and lost their lives to put an end to the Nazi terror and murder machine. They finally fly in the face of Musk’s South African compatriot (albeit on the other side of the racial divide), Nelson Mandela, who made his agreement to a transition from apartheid to democracy contingent on the institutionalization of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The history of apartheid had to be documented and never be forgotten. It included that the regime based its Apartheid laws on Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws of racial discrimination. 

Some will suggest we take Musk seriously, highlighting his smarts and success as an entrepreneur. They may forget that several heads of leading German business enterprises of the 1930s, world leaders in steel production and chemical industries (including the production of Zyklon B), were most appeasing to Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime (and generously accepted the slave labor offered to them). Some later faced justice at Nuremberg. Entrepreneurial success does not go hand in hand with a sense of political ethics and—in Elon Musk’s case—it certainly is accompanied by massive ignorance of German history. Such ignorance delegitimizes his words. The forgetting he preaches is best suited to undermining democracy and to laying the groundwork for future atrocities. An escape to Mars will not be an option.

Joachim Savelsberg, is a professor in the Department of Sociology and an affiliate with the Law School of the University of Minnesota.

“Now the depression of the reactionary government.… It is a disgrace, which gets worse with every day that passes…. Everyone’s keeping their heads down, Jewry most of all and the democratic press.… What is strangest of all is how one is blind in the face of events, how no one has a clue to the real balance of power.… Will the terror be tolerated and for how long? The uncertainty of the situation affects every single thing.” So wrote Victor Klemperer in his private diary on 21 February 1933, scarcely three weeks following Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany the previous month. A literary scholar and war veteran, Klemperer watched firsthand as the pillars of free society crashed down around him. 

In the two weeks that followed this entry, as his supporters celebrated Germany’s so-called “national awakening,” Hitler granted a full pardon to every Nazi stormtrooper in prison and under investigation, restricted the freedom of the press as well as the right to organize and assemble, appointed his closest associates to positions unequal to their qualifications, and laid the groundwork for the Sturmabteilung (SA) and Schutzstaffel (SS) to establish a concentration camp in Dachau. “What, up to the election, I called terror,” Klemperer lamented on 10 March 1933, “was a mild prelude…. It’s astounding how easily everything collapses.” The following month on 3 April 1933, he conceded that “everything I considered un-German, brutality, injustice, hypocrisy, mass suggestion to the point of intoxication, all of it flourishes here.”    

Klemperer’s private writings after Hitler’s Machtergreifung provide an unvarnished portrayal of the humiliation and terror that pervaded everyday life in the Third Reich. Though a chronicler of fascist violence, Klemperer did more than just observe acts of cruelty—he also lived them as well. The son of a rabbi, he converted to Christianity when he was a young man, only later to embrace his Jewish identity as an adult. While Klemperer saw himself as a German, the Nazis regarded him as “un-German,” a prejudicial worldview that eventually cost him his academic position, citizenship, and even his beloved cat, Muschel. “One is an alien species or a Jew with 25 percent Jewish blood,” he grieved on 10 April 1933. “As in fifteenth-century Spain, but then the issue was faith. Today, it’s zoology + business.”  

Most are familiar with the genocidal crimes of the Nazis. Fewer people, however, are aware of the cumulative measures they instituted before the end of 1933 that destroyed Germany’s experiment with liberal democracy. Speed and deception proved essential in this effort. In the first months of the regime, the Nazis orchestrated a series of celebrations and staged pageants that enabled Hitler to hail his executive orders as the popular will of the people. Klemperer’s reflections illuminate both the human and political consequences of these initiatives. They also reveal how even Hitler’s most innocuous pronouncements degraded democratic institutions and normalized violence against minority communities.    

His diary is a remarkable testimony on life in Nazi Germany told from the perspective of someone whom the state sought to degrade, marginalize, and ultimately eradicate from the population—and it makes for chilling reading today. Klemperer commented on a variety of topics between January and May 1933, from the pretense of law and public displays of aggression to interactions with former friends who supported Hitler electorally: 

On law: “On the instruction of the Chancellor of the Reich the five men sentenced in the summer by a special court in Beuthen for the killing of a Communist Polish insurgent have been released (they had been sentenced to death!). The Saxon Commissioner for Justice [meanwhile] orders that the corrosive poison of Marxist and pacifist literature is to be removed from prison libraries, [and] that the penal system must once more be punitive…. We would more likely live in a state of law under French [colonial] occupation than under this government. This is truly no empty phrase: I can no longer get rid of the feeling of disgust and shame. And no one stirs; everyone trembles, keeps out of sight.” 

On executive decree: “Every new government decree, announcement, etc. is more shameful than the previous one. In Dresden an Office to Combat Bolshevism. Reward for important information. Discretion assured. In Breslau Jewish lawyers forbidden to appear in court. In Munich the clumsiest sham of an attempted assassination and linked to it the threat of the ‘biggest pogrom’ if a shot should be fired. And the newspapers snivel…. Goebbels as Minister of Advertising. Tomorrow the ‘Act of State of March 21’! Are they going to have an emperor?”

On administrative dismissal: “The new Civil Service ‘law’ leaves me, as a front-line veteran, in my post—at least for the time being. But all-around rabble-rousing, misery, fear and trembling…. Everyday new abominations. A Jewish lawyer in Chemnitz kidnapped and shot. Provision of the Civil Service Law: anyone who has one Jewish grandparent is a Jew. A worker or employee who is not nationally minded can be dismissed in any factory, [and] must be replaced by a nationally minded one. The NS plant cells must be consulted. For the moment I am still safe. But as someone on the gallows, who has the rope around his neck, is safe. At any moment a new ‘law’ can kick away the steps on which I’m standing and then I’m hanging.”

On propaganda: “Is it the influence of the tremendous propaganda—films, broadcasting, newspapers, flags, ever more celebrations? Or is it the trembling, slavish fear all around? I almost believe now that I shall not see the end of this tyranny…. They are expert at advertising. The day before yesterday we saw (and heard) on film how Hitler holds his big rallies. The mass of SA men in front of him, the half-dozen microphones in front of his lectern, which transmit his words to 600,000 SA men in the whole Third Reich—one sees his omnipotence and keeps one’s head down. And always the Horst Wessel Song. And everyone knuckles under.”

On individual support for the new government: “Unfortunately on Tuesday evening we had the Thiemes here. That was dreadful and the end of that. [Herr] Thieme—of all people—declared himself for the new regime with such fervent conviction and praise. He devoutly repeated all the phrases about unity, upwards, etc. Trude [Thieme] was harmless by comparison. Everything had gone wrong, now we had to try this. ‘Now we just have to join in this song!’ [Herr Thieme] corrected her vigorously. ‘We do not have to,’ the right thing was truly and freely voted for. I [Klemperer] shall not forgive him that…. He runs with the pack. But why to me? Caution in the shape of utterly consistent hypocrisy? Or can he simply not think clearly? 

On futility: “Ever more hopeless. The [Jewish] boycott beings tomorrow. Yellow placards, men on guard. Pressure to pay Christian employees two months salary, to dismiss Jewish ones…. In Munich Jewish university teachers have already been prevented from setting foot in the university. The proclamation and injunction of the boycott committee decrees ‘Religion is immaterial,’ only race matters.”

Klemperer’s accounts during the first months of Nazi rule pulse with emotion. They scorn the authoritarian nature of the government and lament the fate of basic human rights in German society. Once previously uncontentious privileges, such as freedom of religion, the right to an education, and equality before the law, were now at the mercy of a reactionary, all-knowing, lazy man who demanded total allegiance and unwavering praise at all times. “How wretched,” Klemperer scorned. “Gratitude to Hitler—even if the racial question has not yet been clarified, even if the ‘aliens’ … have made important contributions—we thank Hitler, he is saving Germany!”   

One does not need a Ph.D. in German history to make judicious comparisons between the events Klemperer imparted in his diary and present-day affairs. Like in 1933, the most vulnerable individuals today are minorities, notably members of the LGTBQ+ community, people of color, and those in search of political asylum. “The defeat in 1918 did not depress me as greatly as the present state of affairs,” Klemperer wrote on 17 March 1933. “It is shocking how day after day naked acts of violence, breaches of the law, barbaric opinions appear quite undisguised as official decree.” We would be wise to dismiss the false logic that regards state-sponsored discrimination as a unique aspect of Germany’s recent past. History does not repeat itself. But a critical evaluation of historical events can at least provide us a means to learn about the destructive capabilities of nationalism, racism, and centralized oppression. We need look no further than Victor Klemperer and his courageous effort to “bear witness” for such an appraisal.

The remarkable historian and my late advisor, Dr. Eric D. Weitz, wrote extensively about the dangerous potentials that made human rights abuses possible after the French Revolution. He was an unequivocal champion of diversity and liberal democracy, and feared any effort that sought to forge a “homogeneous” society. I have often thought of him during my current research sabbatical in Berlin. In the past weeks, however, I have mostly thought about his closing words in Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (2007): “The threats to democracy are not always from enemies abroad. They can come from those within who espouse the language of democracy and use the liberties afforded them by democratic institutions to undermine the substance of democracy. Weimar cautions us to be wary of those people as well. What comes next can be very bad, even worse than imaginable.”

Memorial plaque outside Victor Klemperer’s former apartment building in Berlin. The text below his name reads: “In his diaries from the time of the National-Socialist dictatorship, he left behind a unique testimony about the everyday persecution of Jews in a German city.” Source: Author’s photo, 26 January 2025. 

Dr. Adam A. Blackler is an associate professor of history at the University of Wyoming. He is serving as a visiting professor of history at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut of the Freie-Universität-Berlin for the 2024-2025 academic year. Dr. Blackler is a historian of modern Germany, whose research emphasizes the transnational dimensions of imperial occupation and settler-colonial violence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His scholarly interests also include the political and social dynamics of Germany’s Weimar Republic and the interdisciplinary fields of holocaust & genocide Studies and international human rights.  

I was able to work on one such project this summer with the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives (UMJA) in the Libraries: Jeanette Frank, born Eugenia Lewin, is a survivor of the Holocaust whose materials reside in the archives. Jeanette’s records contain extensive materials related to her time as a displaced person in the Landsberg am Lech Displaced Persons (DP) camp after the war. The collection includes vaccination records, records of employment, and, most interestingly, a scrapbook of the Yiddish theater troupe “Hazomir,” that Jeanette, (then Eugenia) was a member of during her time in the camp. Included in the records as well are later documents, including Jeanette’s United States passport and naturalization certificate.

Scrapbook page with image of the entire “Hazomir” theater troupe posing in front of a sign for their production of “Der Wilder Mencz” (The Unusual Person), with accompanying newspaper article about the production in Yiddish at right. Eugenia Lewin/Jeanette Frank pictured middle-row center. 
Source:
Jeanette and Kenneth Frank Papers, Upper Midwest Jewish Archives.

Eugenia Lewin/Jeanette Frank with future husband Kaufmann Frankowski, 
later Kenneth Frank, while performing in the “Hazomir” troupe.
Source:
Jeanette and Kenneth Frank Papers, Upper Midwest Jewish Archives.

What all these documents point to is that Eugenia Lewin survived the Second World War and the Holocaust. After spending time living and working in the Landsberg DP camp, she was able to immigrate to the United States, settle in St. Paul, MN, and live over 75 years as an American citizen before passing away in 2003. While an incredible story of survival and resilience, this story may seem similar to many others told within UMJA’s archives. So what makes Jeanette Frank’s story so impactful? The fact that within certain historical records, Eugenia Lewin is not believed to have survived at all.

The Yad Vashem database of survivors’ names lists a Eugenia Lewin, born on December 21st 1916, in Lodz, Poland as missing, presumed murdered after being interned in the Lodz ghetto under the Nazi occupation. Yad Vashem cites as a source a list published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) that includes names of Holocaust victims who perished in the Lodz ghetto. The records found in UMJA’s archives, however, do not presume murder but in fact show her surviving.

According to the UMJA records, Eugenia Lewin was born on December 21st, 1920, in Lodz, Poland. While it is of course possible that two individuals named Eugenia Lewin were interned in the Lodz ghetto, with one perishing and one surviving, UMJA’s research gives reason to believe that a coincidence like this is not the case.

Letter of Recommendation written for Eugenia Lewin by Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik (WMF) in July 1949. The letter reads: “Ms. Eugenia Lewin, born 21st December, 1920 (Prisoner number 38 834) was employed by us from 5th January 1945-8th April 1945 as a concentration camp prisoner.”
Source:
Jeanette and Kenneth Frank Papers, Upper Midwest Jewish Archives.

Within Jeanette Frank’s collection are various recommendation letters given to her after the war to show that she has skills, making her a good candidate for postwar employment. One of these letters came from Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik (WMF), a German manufacturing company which utilized slave labor under the Nazis. The letter states that Eugenia Lewin worked for WMF from January to April 1945, being labeled prisoner 38834, in the Geislingen an der Steige concentration camp. Upon further research, a Eugenia Lewin was listed on a memorial to slave laborers erected at the site of the Geislingen an der Steige camp, and a USHMM record confirms that a Eugenia Lewin was interned as prisoner 38834 in the complex. 

A screenshot of the ‘Namenstafel’ (Name Plaque) erected in memoriam of the female forced laborers interned in Geislingen an der Steige Concentration camp, who were forced to work for WMF between 1944 and 1945. The museum which now stands on the site of the former concentration camp erected this memorial to honor the various women who were sent to Geislingen to work: the circled name above right is Eugenia Lewin, confirming that she was a prisoner at Geislingen after her time in the Lodz Ghetto.
Source:
www.kz-geislingen.de

All of this led me and UMJA Archivist Kate Dietrick, my supervisor for this project, to believe that UMJA’s Eugenia Lewin had survived her time in the Lodz ghetto and was sent to labor in the Geislingen concentration camp. We were left with one more piece of her journey to uncover: how did Eugenia Lewin end up in Landsberg am Lech displaced persons camp, which was located on the other side of Germany?

As I dug further into the fates of forced laborers at Geislingen, I learned that ahead of the Allied forces coming through France, the Nazis sent many slave laborers east from Geislingen to Dachau concentration camp, and to the town of Allach, Germany. Both of these destinations are located just outside of Munich, in southeastern Germany, and are a stone’s throw from the former site of Landsberg am Lech displaced persons camp.

After compiling all of the above evidence, Kate and I sent a letter to Yad Vashem, the world’s Holocaust memory authority located in Israel, supported by scans of documents from Jeanette Frank’s records, to make our case. As of November 2024, Kate heard back from Yad Vashem. In the letter Kate received, Yad Vashem stated that the evidence we provided on Jeanette Frank’s behalf was enough to show her surviving the Holocaust and immigrating to Minnesota. While the revision process can take time, Eugenia Lewin will be removed from Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names, reflecting the fact that she survived the Holocaust. We were extremely excited to hear the news.

This experience became one that spoke to me both personally and academically. I have been lucky enough to have spent time working both with CHGS and UMJA, two organizations that engage in crucial community-facing work. During my time with them I have seen what it means to do historical research that really affects the present.

Being able to work with Jeanette Frank’s Holocaust journey this summer, with the goal of giving her, effectively, her life back in the eyes of Holocaust remembrance, has shown me that the work that I do as a historian has a very real impact on people today, because history is a study of people and their lives. This hit me hardest when, after mailing the letter earlier in the day, Kate met me at Temple of Aaron Cemetery in St. Paul, where Jeanette Frank and her husband Kenneth, formerly Kaufmann Frankowski, are buried. We laid rocks on the headstone in honor of their memory, and decided to read aloud to them the letter we mailed to Yad Vashem in memoriam. 

This experience was a very personal one for me; while we were standing and paying our respects, I could feel the importance of completing this project. It was yet another experience that proved to me that it is this historical work that I want to spend my career doing, and that its effects are great. I am so fortunate to have been able to spend time working with UMJA over this past summer, learning how archival documents are not simply pieces of paper, but pieces of people’s lives. I cannot wait to embark on more projects like this, which educate about the Holocaust, and work to keep the stories of its survivors and victims alive.

Ryken Farr is a junior undergraduate at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, majoring in History and Jewish Studies. He is currently the undergraduate student worker with the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and spent time in August 2024 as a student assistant with the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives.

This first week enabled students to develop a theoretical and empirical understanding of the causes, course, and consequences of the genocide in Rwanda. This prepared students for two weeks in Rwanda, during which they visited sites of memory and discovered how Rwandans tell their own difficult history. Thus, throughout the course, students were encouraged to compare Western and local forms of knowledge. After visiting numerous memorial sites, students began to examine the judicial responses to genocide. They sipped African tea with a gacaca judge who explained the history of gacaca and the structural and personal challenges she encountered in her work. Next, students visited a reconciliation village, where they met with genocide survivors and individuals who participated in the genocide. They heard from the community, learned about their experiences, and asked about reconciliation efforts. Students also met with numerous experts (government and NGOs) whose work aims to preserve the memory of the 1994 genocide and prevent future genocides. This experiential learning fostered fruitful discussions regarding effective strategies for pursuing justice and reconciliation after genocide and the construction of collective memory.

Importantly, as students processed the nation’s tragic history, they also engaged in cultural activities, which offered them a more complete and richer understanding of Rwanda. Unfortunately, most people’s knowledge of Rwanda begins and ends with the horrific events of 1994. Yet, Rwanda is so much more than its history of genocide. Thus, students participated in a range of activities not directly related the genocide. They explored various art museums, took a master class in Rwandan coffee, and visited the first women-owned brewery in Rwanda, where they met other study abroad students from the Ohio State University. And of course, no trip to Rwanda would be complete without a visit to Akagera National Park to see the Big Five.

Jillian LaBranche is a PhD Candidate in Sociology

But like every year—for personal and professional reasons—deciding what to say for International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27th) or the more Zionist-laden Yom Hashoah (April 18th), while avoiding what hasn’t already been said, is a challenge. Personally, and as a Jew, I certainly “remember” in a diverse set of ways, and I openly talk about these practices. From regular write-ups for the Center in my professional capacity, to the reading group I run with former students—as we read Yiddish literature in the original on a weekly basis—individual and collective memory acts take place. 

But every year, coterminous events and life experiences inevitably end up shaping the direction of these memory acts, too. This year was no exception. 

The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies often receives requests to contextualize historical figures, events, etc. pertaining to episodes of genocide and mass violence. Although meaningful outreach work, I experience immense frustration (that I suspect will only increase over time)—at not only the ways that firsthand accounts of genocide survivors are confined to archival sources, but also at how a siloing of approaches to the subject matter erases meaningful connections—not only to the present but also to marginalized stories left untold. Without memory politics (and certainly without historiography—or, the study of the study of history), what are left are universalizing narratives we pretend are divorced from a particular moment in time and locale. 

Furthermore, this universalizing tendency often asserts overly moralistic stances (i.e., “we teach about X individual or X event, because it teaches us to do/not do Y [moral lesson]”), which rarely take into account the very real, complex, individualized, and human grappling with the past, which I argue is vital to pedagogy, research, and outreach.  

There is of course understandable hesitance from educators, community and religious leaders, etc. (and even academics) to address what are deemed the more difficult, perhaps “political” or controversial dimensions of a particular “subject” (i.e., a person, an event, etc), namely how certain actions or events in the past might not be confined to the past after all, and what are the moral complexities of human in/action. It is all too easy to cherry pick the details around particular people, places, and events, especially if we did not take part in someone’s actions, witness the events as they occurred, or take part in an event’s implementation. However, simply viewing events within a well-defined, well-confined historical vacuum (and with ingrained and unexamined biases) often leads to rigidly deciding whom (and what) gets highlighted about events half a world away. In turn, more inclusive, more nuanced, and more personal(ized) approaches are often shut out. 

To be clear, I am certainly not advocating for introducing the full breadth of a particular subject “too soon” in a student’s career; there are obvious reasons why such approaches would be unacceptable. I should also be clear here, that a “moralistic” element of history instruction is not what I solely take issue with. Of course, one of the reasons we study the past is to see how it directly implicates us in the present. There is much to glean from this rationale. At the same time, as well-intentioned as these approaches may be, teaching a particular subject that is full of morally complex actors, while also pretending we can “safely” confine the subject matter culturally, temporally, and geographically to another time and place, both advertently and inadvertently prevents a needed, individual(ized) response, and the needed responsibility to grapple with our own subjectivity. This is certainly why the study of historiography is so important, to ensure that we see how the “study of the study of history” has changed across time and space. Furthermore, we learn to understand what narratives might have been left out, and how those ellisions or changes have in turn been cemented structurally. 

The way we teach (and don’t teach) something, as it is directly linked to a lack of historical memory and historiography, has direct implications—certainly for the current political climate in the United States—and for what has unfortunately been coined the “culture wars.” The consequences of weak leadership in many of our country’s vital (but weakened) democratic institutions, a public distrust of experts, the decline of governmental regulation regarding civil rights and liberties, and longstanding bigotries have all merged to now threaten the bodily autonomy of millions when it comes to racial and gender justice, as well as sexual autonomy. We have seen this recently with current attempts nationwide to silence ethnic studies proponents, who are reframing the orthodoxies of US history to finally center marginalized voices—notably regarding slavery and the ongoing genocide of indigenous groups. 

Similarly frightening effects of our current moment also include the increasing restrictions to abortion access that have been passed on state levels at alarming rates, something that had been occurring for years even before the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Association decision. The anti-trans and anti-drag bills entering legislative dockets across the United States are too numerous to count.  

It’s thus not only important that we as scholars/educators convey how these battles for equality have yet to be “won” outright (even with victories there have been setbacks in the fight for equality). We should also be getting students of all ages (and that includes members of the general public) to see what parallels (and what differences) exist in their own lived experiences, and in turn how this denial of human rights implicates them. 

Although I am not the first scholar to point out the problems educators, marginalized groups, and activists in the United States are facing when teaching histories of racial and gender justice, sexual autonomy, and LGBTQ+ rights, I am also concerned—as someone largely working outside American and Anglophone spheres—that the distorted study of our own past absolutely shapes the way Americans learn about the rest of the world (or don’t). As noted historian Dominique Kirchner Reill has recently written, it would be naive to think that the backlash against the teaching of various subjects, the banning of books, etc. in United States K12 schools in 2023 does (and will) not affect the ways students study and address global histories and cultures. 

A critical intervention of some kind against these measures will by no means be a cure-all for the ongoing structural and moral ills of the United States (i.e., voter disenfranchisement, structural racism, the stripping of bodily autonomy and individual rights, healthcare or lack thereof, etc). However, I argue that, it is for this very reason that we must highlight more personal experiences that push back against universalizing narratives, to instead map out the needed ethical frameworks we need right now, and in real time. I sadly fear these more personalized narratives are even more imperiled due to the very structural and moral issues I hint at. Without these narratives, however, we will individually and collectively fail to expand (much less retain) rights achieved through hard-won battles. 

How does this play out when discussing historical events of genocide and mass violence, particularly at the K12 level, but also at the university level? For the remainder of this essay, I will reflect on several examples that I hope will shed light on some of the paradigm shifts I am advocating for. 

“To Be Human in History”

It was both odd and fortuitous timing that I recently rediscovered a post by Angelika Bammer, Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University. Prior to the COVID-19 Pandemic, Bammer visited the University of Minnesota to speak about her recent book, Born After: Reckoning with the German Past (Bloomsbury, 2019). Bammer writes, “to be a human in history” is to understand how the pasts we inherit (but do not directly experience) shape the self. Bammer, born to German parents in the immediate aftermath of World War II, saw how the Nazi years shaped her life (and her children’s), even if she had not been alive to witness them herself. Also significant, is how Bammer notes the central role of feminist theory in her work, not only in how lived experiences and “the personal” are central to her own scholarship, but how feminist theory itself provides analytical toolkits for “emotionally honest” scholarship — “a dimension of rigor that conventional scholarship all too seldom lacks.” 

This dimension of rigor that Bammer cites is in fact a central role of the humanities in academic scholarship—whether those in STEM and the social sciences find value in it, or not. This does not mean that the humanities have nothing to answer to, historically speaking. Many personal, lived experiences remain largely invisible in the majority of these fields, and are still structurally excluded from sites of power within higher education (including from the apparatuses governing tenure). I certainly implicate the humanities as a whole for these deficits. The concern that I have, however, stems from the continuing derision, dismissal, and underfunding of the arts and humanities. If humanities fields are not around to value the personal, what segment of academia actually will? 

The answers to this question have direct implications to the study of history, as well as the nature of our society as a whole. It is not only a “dimension of rigor” that we forfeit at all levels of education without key awareness of the personal; as educators we also relinquish the responsibility to reshape our professions, our fields, and our world with necessary critical voices and new approaches, and in turn: we forfeit the responsibility to reshape outdated, immoral, and unjust systems. If students are already entering college and are often unaware of the world(s) that they have inherited, and of their own political and ethical agency surrounding the past (especially when it comes to race, gender, and sexuality), where and when do we rectify this, and when teaching about instances of genocide and mass violence later on? 

“The Unethical and the Unspeakable” 

Before I continue, I must say that it is not simply my Jewishness that informs my own approaches to teaching, outreach, etc. regarding genocide and mass violence. It is also my queer identity as a gay man that profoundly shapes my own approaches to German Jewish and Yiddish literatures and cultures, and in turn minority language rights and visibility when discussing comparative topics within Holocaust and Genocide Studies. I am constantly at odds with the US public’s unspoken orthodoxies around these subjects, in the ways these orthodoxies erase pre-World-War-II Jewish cultures and politics beyond Zionism, as well as gender and sexuality in memory politics. It is indeed acknowledging “the personal,” which confronts these orthodoxies and transgressively subverts forms of scholarly and cultural (including racialized, gendered, and heteronormative) gatekeeping that are also in academia. 

We can all work outside given norms and buck any orthodoxies we so wish, but other, more sinister forms of gatekeeping at sites of power will often silence these attempts. It is at these moments, when gatekeeping is most pronounced, and in this historical epoch in which we find ourselves that we should be cognizant of the actual lessons we need to be teaching. 

These reflections came to a head when I attended a talk via Zoom at the Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research at the University of Southern California. Carli Snyder (PhD Candidate at CUNY Graduate Center and Visiting Research Fellow at the USS Shoah Foundation) gave a brilliant talk entitled, “Questions of Gender and Sexuality in Interviewer Trainings and Holocaust Survivor Testimonies.” What Snyder, through her groundbreaking and important intervention has made clear, is that histories of genocide are not universal, nor are they confined to set start and end dates, and the traumatic effects of such moments are not confined to one particular generation of eyewitnesses. Instead, it is up to scholars, educators, students, and activists to grapple with what histories emerge anew through greater contextualization of the objects in question, and namely with the ways gendered histories of violence are central to eyewitness testimony. 

For Snyder, the “objects” not only include oral history interviews that were conducted for the Visual History Archive, but how they were conducted for an archival repository such as the VHA, when they were conducted (i.e., the individual and collective moment between 1995 and 1998 when the bulk of the VHA interviews were recorded), who conducted them, and what the subjects discussed. These might seem like obvious research questions that have long been answered, but Snyder (and many others including myself) can assure you that they have not; universalizing narratives have a way of erasing particularities, and obscuring the very political nature of historical objects as they speak to us today. Furthermore, attempts to give voice to “the particular” (i.e., through civil rights, gender equality, and so forth) are, as I have argued, ongoing and not at all a given in our current moment. 

For example, Snyder is researching the work of Joan Ringelheim, who was and remains a pioneering figure in the collection of Holocaust testimony. Snyder demonstrated how Ringelheim was one of the first to point out in the 1980s that Holocaust histories were often “condensed” into a “universal” or “gender-neutral” framework, or a “universal human perspective,” and did not take into account the differences in experiences according to gender. First as an independent scholar and later at the Holocaust Memorial Museum as Director of the oral history division, Ringelheim coined what she called “the Unethical and the Unspeakable,” which she had presented on at a conference, “Women surviving the Holocaust” in 1983. Ringelheim conducted circa 20 interviews in the late 1970s and early 1980s with women survivors, who addressed issues such as sexual assault, strategic sexual relationships, pregnancy, abortion, menstruation, and sexuality. 

During her talk, Snyder showed how the format of Ringelheim’s interviews was one of collaboration and exploration—on the part of both the interviewer and the interviewee. Ringelheim’s groundbreaking approach to documenting the oral histories of women was, however, only one dimension of an intervention that is still continuing; Snyder sees this when some of Ringeheim’s interviewees later provided oral histories for the Shoah Foundation in the 1990s, and in turn how markedly different they were. Rarely do subjects interviewed by Ringelheim mention with the Shoah Foundation the experiences they had pertaining to gender and sexuality. Not to mention, if survivors ended up providing information about their gendered experiences, the sexual violence they were subject to, or anything about their sexuality in general, it often came through the interviewee volunteering the information — not on behalf of the interviewer conducting the oral history. 

This should immediately raise numerous questions for scholars, educators, and students. What do we make of an archival record of oral histories and testimonies that, though extensive, has left out, excised, deemed less valuable, etc. certain topics and human subjects according to gender and sexuality? The Visual History Archive, for example, contains over 50,000 interviews with survivors of genocide and mass violence, survivors who are the subject of not only their VHA interview, but likely other interviews, public talks, etc. Although an incredibly rich archive that generations of scholars will certainly be researching, it should be made apparent that these interviews are simply not static “objects;” they are the very real products of “the personal.”  Taking this into account, how then does gender and sexuality more broadly factor in (or not) to these 50,000+ interviews? And the ways histories of the Holocaust are taught more broadly? What might we glean if we take a deeper dive into the material? Can we discuss and teach with these materials differently? 

Queer Intergenerational Trauma

Also around the time Snyder’s talk took place, I stumbled upon an article on social media from The Advocate concerning the German Bundestag’s recognition of LGBTQ+ victims by the Nazis on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Although this was not the first time a German government official acknowledged Queer and Trans victims of the Nazi regime, the President of the Bundestag acknowledged, publicly for the first time, that Germany’s collective memory culture has a responsibility in acknowledging the histories of all groups persecuted by the Nazi state. 

These are fairly recent developments within a larger, complicated (and contested) past. It was only in 2017 that the German government annulled the convictions of 50,000 homosexual men tried by the Nazis, as well as those tried and convicted in the postwar (West German) era under Paragraph 175. The annulment finally made victims of persecution under the law eligible for reparations. Unfortunately, many men who had been convicted had passed away by that time. Furthermore, accounts from individuals persecuted for their sexuality by the Nazis and in the postwar Germanies are sparse. According to this German-language documentary approximately 80% of men sent to concentration camps for homosexuality (5,000 – 15,000 men) did not survive the camps at all, having faced brutal treatment by guards and other inmates alike. 

The Nuremberg Trials had also refused to address crimes against homosexual men due to the Paragraph 175’s continued enforcement after 1945 (and those found guilty under the Nazis remained imprisoned). As a result, Holocaust and Genocide studies research took decades to give this topic its due. Although anti-sodomy laws largely targeted same-sex relations between men, lesbians in Imperial, Weimar, Nazi, and postwar Germanies (particularly in West Germany), also faced incredible oppression due to deeply sexist and patriarchal norms governing society. The experiences of lesbians who faced discrimination and erasure, and whose lives were also destroyed in various ways from the 19th century onward, remain understudied. Histories of those who today would identify as trans and non-binary, who were often the subjects of early sexology, hardly exist in the secondary literature at all. These norms also largely erased women’s sexuality from public discourse as a whole. Not to mention during the Nazi era, racial hierarchies and misogyny restricted women’s sexual autonomy completely. 

Even as homosexuality was partially decriminalized in both East and West Germany by the late 1960s, only political activism over multiple decades led to recognition of the persecution under the Nazis and in the postwar era. The Nazis further strengthening of Prussian-era Paragraph 175 in 1935, the flight of many queer and trans people from Germany after 1933 facing marginalization elsewhere, and West and East Germany’s further criminalization of homosexuals who remained imprisoned after the war, demonstrates how histories of persecution are fluid, and continue to affect subsequent generations. It should not be surprising that, like with gendered differences in experience of genocide survivors, the uneven (and often invisible or unavailable) archival record regarding (Queer) sexuality is structural in nature, also. 

So back to Snyder: in her talk, Snyder cited a profound example that illustrates many of these histories, which lie within oral testimonies just beneath the surface. Language politics and code switching (for those studying minority language politics), Jewish migration within Europe, the role of communal organizations for Jews living in poverty, etc. all appear in Rachel Goldman Miller’s testimony within the first segment of the oral history interview. These dimensions of the testimony could be discussed at length. However, Goldman Miller’s experiences, as they relate to Snyder’s talk on gender and sexuality, are (though graphic) also vital to her story. 

Goldman Miller was adopted by an American Jewish soldier, who sexually molested her. Goldman Miller was then kicked out of the house after the soldier’s wife discovered the abuse, and was sent into foster care. In her interview, conducted in 1994, Goldman Miller recounts these instances of sexual abuse and exploitation in her own words, and in turn how these episodes fit into a larger history of her trauma, both personal and collective regarding gendered experiences of genocide. 

Also striking are the ways that Goldman Miller threads other familial details into her oral history (e.g., details about her grandchildren) before suddenly interjecting to say: she “had a second Holocaust.” Viewers of the oral history will have noticed that Goldman Miller wears a ribbon from the AIDS Walk Los Angeles. It is here that Goldman Miller mentions her son, Mark, who had died of AIDS complications two years prior, and who becomes the subject of his mother’s interview for over 20 minutes. It is this traumatic episode that Goldman Miller goes on to say (again) that her son’s death was “her second Holocaust.” It is clear that Goldman Miller struggles to continue with her “testimony” without first going into further details about her son’s life, and how she and her husband cared for him up until the moment he passed away. 

It is incredibly important to recognize that, had the interviewer not allowed Goldman Miller to continue uninterrupted, this particular narrative would be absent from the archive today. 

It is profound for a Holocaust survivor to say in her oral testimony that, “[HIV/AIDS] is another Holocaust that we have to do something about; there are many kinds (Tape 4, 27:32).” We should sit with the uniqueness of this statement. This is not only an important dimension to the interviewee’s story pertaining to the Holocaust; the history of HIV/AIDS activism and familial support that comes to light is significant, considering that many who fell sick and died faced intense marginalization from their families, their employers, etc. Goldman Miller goes on to also mention the Rwandan Genocide, taking place coterminously with her interview, which is an important reminder to 2023 viewers that Holocaust survivors were not viewing their own histories in a vaccuum. 

If survivors of genocide are making these parallels, why aren’t we? Why are we siloing the narratives pertaining to the Holocaust from other genocides? What is our responsibility as listeners, researchers, instructors, and students? 

This interview is a horrific example of the difficult subject matter often left out of universalized histories of genocide, but it also uncovers the ways in which an interviewee such as Goldman Miller writes her son into her own narrative, into a history that he did not witness but perhaps felt to some extent as a child of a Holocaust survivor and a gay man (as others with those lived experiences did). And in turn: Goldman Miller writes herself into that of her son’s history of marginalization and mass death. This is apparent when Goldman Miller goes through photographs (a common and incredibly rich element to the Visual History Archive interviews) depicting her family (including of her children and grandchildren), relatives who were murdered during the Holocaust, gravestones in Paris with French and Yiddish inscriptions, etc. For those familiar with the Visual History Archive, material objects often enter into the interviews, and Goldman Miller includes her son’s panel from the AIDS Quilt into the recording, thereby entering into a larger historical narrative and dialogue regarding state violence and and public inaction toward marginalized groups. 

I have published past blog articles for CHGS related to Queer and Trans histories, and the politics of memory during the AIDS crisis. As activists in the 1980s and 1990s (many of whom happened to be related to Holocaust survivors) saw parallels to their own lived experience as they refashioned and reclaimed symbols, such as the rosa Winkel (pink triangle) for their own use, and pointing out that the past is not only in the past. If one thinks about how the majority of the VHA interviews were conducted in the mid-1990s, one can only surmise how other genocide survivors hint at and refer to other global conflicts and instances of genocide occurring around that time. How can we possibly, and ethically, confine the Holocaust to 1933-1945? And more importantly, how can we continue to separate out these events separate from one another when memory links them together? 

I am certainly not advocating for reductive, side-by-side comparisons when teaching about episodes of genocide and mass violence. But how can we better include topics around race, racism(s) and racialization, gender, and sexuality when we teach about historical events—as they connect us to our pasts, and especially as they circulate in survivor narratives we teach in our classrooms? What are survivors saying to, and about, us? 

What I propose as a simple starting point, is to always view our focus on specific historical events through the lens of our contemporary world and its politics—not as a depoliticized figment of a distant time or place. Students should then think about: what politically is taking place both in the United States and globally? Why should we (really) be studying this topic in 2023? What orthodoxies might need to be placated for more inclusive studies of such events—and not only of the events themselves, but also of ourselves, as we are responsible for grappling with this subject matter? Although historical narratives elsewhere might differ from what we encounter in the United States, race, (and, to echo Snyder) gender, and sexuality are embedded in survivor narratives about the Holocaust, and we are ethically responsible for making sure that that embeddedness is discussed and centered. 

Select Academic Resources: 

Hájková, Anna. ‘Den Holocaust queer erzählen,’ Sexualitäten Jahrbuch, 2018, pp. 86-110.

Huneke, Samuel Clowes. “Heterogeneous Persecution: Lesbianism and the Nazi State,” Central European History 54.2 (2021): 297-325

——. “Death Wish: Suicide and Stereotype in the Gay Discourses of Imperial and Weimar Germany” New German Critique 46.1 (1 February 2019): 127-166. 

——. States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022.

Marhoefer, Laurie. Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015.

——. Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, his Student, and the Empire of Queer Love. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. 

——. “Lesbianism, Transvestitism, and the Nazi State: A Microhistory of a Gestapo Investigation, 1939-1943.” The American Historical Review 121, no. 4 (2016): 1167–95.

Newsome, Jake. Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022. 

Ringelheim, Joan. “The Unethical and the Unspeakable: Women and the Holocaust.” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual. 1 (1984) 69-88. 

——. Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 10(4), 741-761.

Schenker, Noah. Reframing Holocaust Testimony. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. 

USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) Please note: public access to the entire archives is limited. To view the entire collection of oral testimonies, please contact the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies or (for Minnesota residents) the University of Minnesota Libraries for further information. 

Goldman-Miller, Rachel. Interview 40. Interview by Rose Shoshana Finkelstein. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, August 02, 1994. Accessed February 01, 2023. https://vha.usc.edu/testimony/40

Publicly-Available Digital Resources: 

Bibliography on LGBTQ+ Communities Before, During, and After the Holocaust (compiled by Dr. Jake Newsome)

Bibliography on Lesbian and Trans Women in Nazi Germany (compiled by Dr. Anna Hájková)

Lesbians under the Nazi Regime (published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Gay Men under the Nazi Regime (published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) 

Bibliography – Gays and Lesbians (published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Long Road to Legal Reform – from the Arolsen Archives

Subject Guide – German-Language Materials Held in the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies (University of Minnesota Libraries – Archives and Special Collections) 

From Deutsche Welle: A History of Persecution in West and East Germany

Meyer Weinshel completed his PhD in Germanic Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is Head of Programming, Publications, and Research at the Center for Austrian Studies, and the Collections Curator for the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies. From 2021-2022, he was a Co-PI (and later postdoctoral researcher) for the Minnesota Human Rights Archive project (MHRA). He also taught German studies coursework in the UMN Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch (GNSD) from 2015-2020, and served as a visiting lecturer of Yiddish studies in the Ohio State University’s Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures in 2021. From 2018 to 2020, he was also involved with various Yiddish pedagogy initiatives at the Yiddish Book Center (Amherst, MA)—including the piloting of their new textbook, In eynem, working for the Book Center’s Steiner Yiddish Summer Program, and designing and teaching Yiddish community-education courses with Jewish Community Action (Minneapolis, MN). In addition to subject specializations in genocide studies, German studies, Yiddish studies, and Jewish studies, he also researches LGBTQIA+ histories, memory, translation, and migration.

Lasting only 100 days, April 7th, 1994, marked the beginning of the Rwandan Genocide in which over 800,000 ethnic Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed as the international community and UN peacekeepers stood by. Emboldened by state-sponsored propaganda and armed with rudimentary weapons, ordinary Rwandans of Hutu ethnicity were mobilized into killing militias. Scholars have estimated that the rate of killing was four times that of Nazi Germany and carried out by 175,000 to 230,000 Hutus. Much has been written about the causes and courses of this tragic event, as well as commemoration practices in Rwanda. But today, in honor of the lives lost, I would like to share with you how some Rwandans work to prevent future genocide in the land of a thousand hills.

Twenty-nine years after the conclusion of the genocide, there is now a whole new generation of Rwandans born after 1994. Over the course of five months in 2022, I had the privilege to interview history teachers, education experts, and parents in Rwanda to learn how older generations who experienced the violence teach this newer generation about their nation’s history. The teachers I spoke with emphasized the importance of learning and teaching history to younger generations. Many teachers discussed the importance of learning about Rwanda’s history to create a better future, increase knowledge of Rwandan culture, and prevent future violence. For example, one teacher remarked,

 “[The] history of Rwanda was characterized by the evils and wrongly taught. So, we studied wrongly; they gave us information that is not true about the history of Rwanda. And for me, I said I must change [that] … and this is my contribution to my country, to change this bad history.” 

Before the genocide, schools had been sites of structural violence, where anti-Tutsi propaganda was disseminated and discrimination enforced. And during the genocide, many schools were actual sites of violence. Given this history, teachers understood how easily history may be used and manipulated to mobilize populations into violence. Thus, teachers expressed a commitment to teaching youth about the causes and consequences of genocide.

While in Rwanda, I met with local organizations and individuals dedicated to preventing genocide and promoting peace. I met with PeacEdu Initiative, a local organization that works with communities to foster reconciliation and prevent genocide through peace education. Here, survivors and those who committed genocide crimes come together to learn about genocide and gain new skills. 

I was also fortunate to attend trainings where teachers throughout the country volunteered their time to learn about peace and human rights education. Many of these teachers ran peace and human rights clubs during the weekends at their schools. Finally, I spoke with parents, many of whom placed their faith in education to prevent future violence. As one parent stated,

“…we need now to put reconciliation first and foremost. We shouldn’t be stuck in our zones of thinking [that] we are divided or different. But rather, we should learn about the history and get lessons from it which will help bring national unity.” 

This parent’s comment reflects the sentiments of many others. In fact, many parents who taught their children about the genocide emphasized the importance of reconciliation and national unity. Holistically, parents aimed to teach their children that national identity must be prioritized over all other identities.

I am encouraged by the commitment of teachers, parents, and local communities in Rwanda to ensure younger generations know about genocide. Today, on a day of sorrow and remembrance, I hope you, too, are inspired by their commitment to foster unity and reconciliation in the hope of a more peaceful future. 

Jillian LaBranche is a PhD student at the University of Minnesota in the Sociology Department. She currently holds the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship. Her doctoral research examines how parents and teachers in Sierra Leone and Rwanda who experienced mass violence educate younger generations about their nation’s sensitive history. She has broad interests in Genocide Studies, Comparative Methods, and Memory Studies.

It was only recently that northern Germany came up with an answer to these architectural challenges from the south, which is no less Disneyesque than Neuschwanstein and historically at least as unappetizing as the Eagle’s Nest. It’s a replica of the Royal Prussian Palace planted in the middle of Berlin, home to Germany’s last kaiser whose madness was far more consequential for world politics than Ludwig’s. Kaiser Wilhelm’s passion was world domination, not building fairy tale castles, and WWI was a direct result of his imperial hubris. In the end the Kaiser’s empire collapsed, but his palace didn’t. It even remained more or less intact through the next world war and another failed attempt at world domination, this time by the owner of the Eagle’s Nest. And yes, this all sounds like the typical plot for 007 movies: supervillains living in fancy hideouts trying to bring the planet under their control. Even the grand finale could have been taken from a James Bond novel: the Kaiser’s palace was spectacularly blown to bits with dynamite like Auric Goldfinger’s volcano lair in You Only Live Twice. The palace’s lucky streak was over when it ended up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, in Berlin’s Soviet Sector, where feudal architecture didn’t have many fans. Later, the communists would proudly claim responsibility for the Big Bang that finished off Prussia’s history and its most visible symbol. Once and for all, so they thought.

You could argue that predicting history and getting it wrong is what Marxists do. But a sequel to the palace’s story in which the German taxpayer is willing to pay half a billion euros for a tacky remake—70 years into the federal republic and with no monarch in sight—would have been even beyond Ian Fleming’s imagination. How did that come about? How could a group of wealthy ultraconservatives, some with close ties to Germany’s far right and antisemitic AfD, lead the entire country by the nose and make parliament agree to pay the bill for a palace look-alike that had virtually no artistic merit? With pockets as deep as their minds were shallow, these businessmen were running campaigns in Germany with Trumpian slogans at a time when Donald Trump was still running casinos into the ground. “Let’s make Berlin beautiful again” was one of those slogans. And it caught on. Hard to believe this happened in the same country that, just a few years earlier and a few blocks away, had reserved prime real estate, bigger than three football fields, for its Holocaust Memorial.

To top it all off, as a finishing touch the palace received its shiny dome again bearing the exact same inscription as in the 1850s. It’s printed in flashy golden letters on a blue ribbon that runs around the dome’s base and demands that “in the name of Jesus all of them that are in heaven and on earth and under the earth should bow down on their knees.” This made clear that Prussia was a Christian state with its king solely reporting to God and certainly not to his underlings. And to leave no doubt about which faith is the right faith, the dome was topped with a glittering giant cross that sat on a tiny orb and sent yet another message of world domination. This particular piece of roof decoration has been remade from scratch and reinstalled as well. For what? As a nod to American tourists from the Bible Belt? While the glaring resurrection of cross and orb may warm the hearts of Christian nationalists from all around the globe, it keeps sending chills down the spines of Berlin’s Jewish community who, along with many other groups, protested against the uncontextualized display of religious supremacy.

The palace is no longer called the palace. It’s now a public building named the Humboldt Forum, which at first didn’t have a real function beyond pretending to be the palace. Then, in another breathtakingly callous move, it was decided that the Forum should house Berlin’s Ethnological Museum. Many of its artifacts and treasures are from the heady days when the Kaiser’s navy was roaming the seas, making landfalls in Africa and Asia, massacring the population and mopping up what other colonial powers had missed. Putting the stolen artwork back in the Kaiser’s palace is like decorating the Eagle’s Nest with Nazi plunder. As a result, curators at the Humboldt Forum have a lot of explaining to do right now. There is a good chance that eventually, when claims are settled and things returned to their rightful owners, all that’s left to curate is a Potemkin palace.

So, should you decide to invest your soaring US dollars into cheap euros during the next travel season, there is nothing wrong with spending them on a trip to Mad King Ludwig’s and Walt Disney’s Neuschwanstein. It is, after all, more than a hundred years old and a real castle.

Henning Schroeder is a professor at the University of Minnesota and currently teaches in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch. His email address is schro601@umn.edu and his Twitter handle is @HenningSchroed1.

The staggering level of support from the German government is in line with the horrors perpetrated by the Nazi government between 1933 and 1945. The Claims Conference, while clearly unable to atone for the past, is an attempt by the German government to answer to crimes committed against European Jews under the Nazi regime. On a recent trip to Berlin, I was reminded that signs of this culpability extend all the way down to the streets, where memorials, placards, and other public history displays make clear the role of the National Socialist government in perpetrating the Holocaust.

But while these memorials to the Holocaust ensure that it can never be ignored or forgotten, not all of German history is on public display. There is a story that is conspicuously absent; Germany’s role as a colonial power. The country’s colonial aspirations began even before it gained overseas territories—through merchants who profited off slave labor in other European colonies. It wasn’t until 1884 when the Berlin Conference established the rules for the European colonization of Africa, that the newly formed German Empire established colonies in East and West Africa and the South Pacific. Like their European counterparts, German officials brutally exploited its colonies. Many of the hallmarks of genocidal oppression elsewhere in African colonies could be found in Germany’s colonies as well, including the violent campaigns of retaliation against tribes asserting independence, most notably the 1904-1907 genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in what is now Namibia. The legacies of German colonialism run much deeper than what can be presented in a blog article, but they still reverberate across the African continent and Germany today. 

The German government has accepted responsibility for its colonial crimes, but only somewhat. In May 2021, Germany formally apologized for its treatment of the Herero and Nama peoples, officially labeling its actions as genocide in a statement read by then Foreign Minister Heiko Maas:

We will officially call these events what they were from today’s perspective, a genocide. In doing so, we acknowledge our historical responsibility. In light of Germany’s historical and moral responsibility, we will ask Namibia and the descendants of victims for forgiveness. 

In December, the agreement was finalized. In addition to a formal apology from the German government, Namibia will receive more than a billion dollars in aid meant to support Namibia’s infrastructure and public services over the next three decades, which amounts to just under $37 million in funds annually. While the funds appear low, Namibia’s Human Development Index is ranked 139th out of 191 nations, meaning there is a great need for support in the country. 

The apology has significant symbolic value and aid for Namibia is much-needed, but I couldn’t help but notice the absence of acknowledgment of Germany’s colonial past in its public history. Berlin’s Tiergarten, which features Holocaust memorials to the Persecuted Homosexuals Under National Socialism and the Roma and Sinti, still includes a statue of Otto von Bismark, the architect of the Berlin Conference. These histories are seemingly at odds with each other and are representative of a country willing to confront the horrors of one past while ignoring another. It’s important to remember that like the Holocaust, Germans of the colonial period would have been exposed to colonialism directly; it wasn’t restricted to overseas territories. Many Africans settled in Germany and, in some cases, even married white German women. However, the experience of Afro-Germans and those in the former colonies don’t seem to be a part of mainstream discourse from the German state. 

In light of this erasure, several groups across Germany are working to raise the profile of the country’s colonial past in the public consciousness. Located in Berlin, the organization Dekoloniale “tests how a metropolis, its space, its institutions and its society can be examined on a broad level for (post-)colonial effects, how the invisible can be experienced and the visible can be irritated.” In so doing, the organization aims to shift the public discourse away from the history of the oppressors to the story of the victims. Some of its work has included the exhibition Looking Back, organized in conjunction with the Treptow Museum. When the museum wanted to revisit the problematic 1896 colonial exhibition in Berlin, Dekoloniale stepped in, helping organize an exhibit that tells the story of the more than 100 African and Pacific Islanders sent to Germany to serve as a human zoo. For me, a particularly astonishing project is its mapping project, connecting the stories of Afro-Germans with Berlin and former German African colonies, bringing the story of the city’s ties with colonialism home.

In Hamburg, Afro-German activists have opened Arca – Afrikanisches Bildungszentrum, an African-focused library, helping to fill a need they felt public libraries would not and providing a cultural hub. The library itself is housed in a former prison (and before that, military barracks) that’s now being used as an artist commune. It’s one of a number of education centers opened across Germany showcasing Black, Afro-German, and Afro-diasporic perspectives and resources. Coming from the United States which incarcerates its Black population at a staggering rate, the symbolism of a former prison now housing an organization that celebrates African & Black identity cannot be missed. 

Despite the many groups working across Germany to raise awareness of its colonial past, it’s an uphill challenge. For instance in Berlin, attempts to rename M-Street (M being a racial slur commonly used during the colonial past) have been rebuffed by residents, echoing a similar unwillingness to rename sites across the Twin Cities (see the debate around Bde Maka Ska and, more recently, Historic Fort Snelling). The street name remains in place, despite continued efforts. In Hamburg, the city’s Speicherstadt district, a UNESCO world heritage site, is receiving millions of dollars in reinvestment in an effort to turn the area into a tourism destination. In spite of the city’s stated goal to create an inclusive space, many of the buildings in the area will now feature the names of European colonial explorers like Columbus, Vespucci, and Marco Polo. These names tie back to a glorified history of European exploration that Hamburg no doubt wants to connect itself to, but do not reflect the diverse population of the city today and serve to reinforce the legacies of colonialism. 

I wrote several years ago after the disappointing vote of Rep. Ilhan Omar on the Armenian genocide that recognizing one genocide doesn’t preclude acknowledging another. I can’t shake a similar feeling I have after my two weeks in Germany. The memorials, displays, and exhibitions across Germany serve as an important reminder to never forget the horrors of the Holocaust but also stand in stark contrast to the largely absent public memory of colonial history. I went to Germany expecting to examine how the Holocaust can serve as a catalyst to publicly present other difficult pasts but I left with the impression that many of the challenges we have in representing the legacies of colonialism in Minnesota are similar in Germany. It became clear that while in some instances Germany can serve as the prime example of a country reckoning with its difficult past, its lack of colonial awareness, at times bordering on denial, shows that it’s essentially no different than many other former colonial powers. 

Note: This trip was part of the “Building a Diverse and Inclusive Culture of Remembrance (DAICOR)” fellowship, a project hosted by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung in Washington, DC, and CulturalVistas and funded by the Transatlantic Program of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. 

Joe Eggers is the Interim Director of the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies.

Gelinada Grinchenko, Professor of History at Kharkiv National University, Ukraine, President of the Oral History Association, Ukraine, and Scholar at Risk at the University of Wuppertal, Germany, reflects on her forthcoming book and series of accompanying short films On Kharkiv and ourselves: the city’s fates and experiences in its inhabitants’ oral histories. Gelinada also discusses her experience and role in the context of the current conflict in Ukraine as an oral historian, survivor, and potential storyteller in the future.

‘On the evening of 23 February 2022, my colleagues and I recorded my commentary for a short film to accompany the second part of the book.  The book is in three parts: the beginning of the Nazi-Soviet war and the Nazi invasion in Kharkiv; the Holocaust and the Nazi crimes in the city; and life under occupation, liberation and the end of the war.  This second film focused on the Nazi persecution of the Jews of Kharkiv and its culmination in the execution of about ten thousand Jews in Drobytsky Yar in December 1941-January 1942 on the eastern outskirts of the city. Recording the commentary was hard and back at home, I was worried about how best to combine the voices of the narrators in the film with my commentary as the researcher, together with archive photographs, animation, sound effects, and music. I fell asleep late that night, and two hours later, I woke up from the sound of real explosions: at 5 am on the 24 February 2022 the Russians bombed my city.

‘I began my work on this book in 2021 with two groups of sources: the University of Southern California (USC) Shoah Foundation collection of oral histories of the Holocaust survivors’ from Ukraine – recorded in the mid 1990s, and those recorded by the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center (Kyiv, Ukraine) between 2018 and 2021. Being recorded at different times, these oral histories provide an opportunity to analyse, among other things, changes in the official narrative of the war.

‘The book is dedicated to my mother. She was born and raised in Kharkiv and experienced the war as a little girl.  The most terrible thing that she remembers is how the track in which she and her mother and several other officer’s families, who were leaving the city, came under bombardment.

‘I am sure that when I am 86, I will also recall with horror the sound of a Russian plane over Kharkiv when my family fled. And now, I perceive the stories of many of the Second World War survivors in a completely different way. When they say that, according to their impression, the plane was flying to kill them directly, earlier I considered that as a hyperbole, an emotional exaggeration. Now I understand and empathise with them. Two months ago, when we fled from Kharkiv in March 2022, it seemed to me too that there were only three of us in the whole world: the Russian killer pilot, my frightened little son, and me.

‘Now that I am in a safe place, I think a lot about the parallels between my experience and the experience of those who survived the Second World War. The escalation of “never again” into “never? again!” turned my personal life and my research beliefs and priorities upside down.  From my own experience – no longer as a researcher but as a survivor – I see that we have very few ethical standards, and moral guidelines for conducting oral history research in times of war. This is a particular concern for people who continue to experience the trauma of loss, displacement, bombing, or flight. How should researchers approach fieldwork in times of continuously unfolding trauma? How can we conduct interview-based research in times of war without harming those with whom we work? These are the central questions of a planned summer institute: Witnessing War in Ukraine, Oral History and Interview-based research.’

For more information about the summer institute, click here.

To watch the first of the short films about the beginning of the war in 1941 in Kharkiv: