International conference on the Shoah to be held at Freie Universität Berlin from January 10 to 12, 2024

Scholars from all over Europe who study the role played by local administrations in facilitating the Holocaust will convene at Freie Universität Berlin from January 10 to 12, 2024. At the conference “Local Administrations and the Holocaust: Occupation, Collaboration, and Resistance,” researchers will compare the conduct of local administrators during the Holocaust in various European countries in order to determine whether we can speak of a transnational dimension to local administration in the Shoah.

Local administrations were involved in the persecution and murder of European Jews in occupied, allied, and sovereign countries. They helped the Nazis to ghettoize and systematically monitor Jews, take over their property, collect taxes, and organize mass shootings and deportations to extermination camps. “Without the help of numerous officials in the communal, district, and county administrations, the Nazis would not have been able to murder six million Jews while fighting against the Soviet Union, occupying countries in Western and Eastern Europe, and struggling with the resistance movements. The role of local administrations in the implementation of the Holocaust was significant,” says conference organizer and historian Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe from the Friedrich Meinecke Institute at Freie Universität Berlin.

Roughly twenty prominent experts are expected to attend the conference. The three-day event will be opened by president of Freie Universität Berlin Günter M. Ziegler and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe. Peter Romijn, former director of research at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam and author of the first study on Dutch mayors who collaborated during the German occupation, will hold the keynote speech. The conference will feature a number of international researchers from countries such as the Netherlands, Poland, the United Kingdom, Croatia, Romania, Hungary, Ukraine, Czechia, France, Belarus, Serbia, Russia, and Greece, who will discuss different aspects of the role of municipal administrations in the Holocaust. The conference is being funded by the Alfred Landecker Foundation and the Division of International Affairs at Freie Universität Berlin.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Event Details

• Event dates: January 10–12, 2024
• Venues: Opening address on January 10 at the Henry Ford Building (Freie Universität Berlin), Garystraße 35, 14195 Berlin. Conference on January 11–12 at Harnack House (Max Planck Society), Ihnestraße 16–20, 14195 Berlin-Dahlem.
• More information and conference program: https://www.hsozkult.de/event/id/event-139901

Contact

PD Dr. Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Friedrich Meinecke Institute, Department of History and Cultural Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Email: g.r-l@fu-berlin.de