More than 13,5 million people from all over Europe were forced to work within the German Reich under Nazi rule during World War II. The precise numbers of those forced to work in the occupied territories are still disputed. Resulting from the German warfare, forced labour became an essential part of the National Socialist economy leading into growing work requirements, closely entangled with the economic exploitation of the occupied territories. Alongside Prisoners of War (POWs) and concentration camp inmates, ordinary civilians formed the biggest group of forced labourers. Most of them were accommodated in poor camps and barracks. Mistreatment, malnutrition, and violence were daily fares. 30.000 camps for civilian forced labourers alone existed within the boundaries of German rule.

At the end of World War II many former forced labourers were trapped as Displaced Persons (DPs) within the German territory facing an uncertain future. Those who decided to return to their countries of origin often faced rejection or were treated as ‘traitors’, accused of collaboration with the German war industry. Although forced labour was ubiquitous all over the Reich, the history of civilian forced labourers under Nazi rule was scarcely noted in the German and European public discourse for many years. Only in the late 1980s the topic established itself following a pioneering study published by Ulrich Herbert (1985), and the public appearance of associations of former forced labourers in several European countries. This enabled the negotiation of (partial) compensation payments to some of the victims. Yet, the subject of forced labour is rarely addressed in any scholarly curricula.

The International Winter School for Educators ‘Nazi Forced Labour: History and Aftermath’ dealt with these topics and took place at the International Youth Centre of the Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre from February 19th to February 25th 2017. It was conceptualized and led by TANJA VAITULEVICH (Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre), AKIM JAH (ITS) and ELISABETH SCHWABAUER (ITS). The 2017 Winter School thus brought together academics, teachers, museologists, and cultural and educational freelancers from eleven different countries. By placing special emphasis on the topic of civilian forced labour as a particular phenomenon within the broader framework of the Third Reich and WWII, the project week aimed at providing a forum for educators willing to exchange ideas, methods and teaching practices connected to the subject from a transnational perspective.

It took place on the historical grounds of a former forced labour camp in Berlin Schöneweide today maintained by the Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre (DZNSZA). Opened in summer 2006, the DZNSZA offers a unique setting for researching, exposing and communicating the history of civilian forced labour under Nazi rule, and its immanent mechanisms of oppression and exploitation. By drawing on the Centre’s specialised library and archive, the participants were encouraged to discover biographical documentation or further fields of interest.

In addition, the Winter School aimed at familiarizing the participants with the holdings of the ITS archive. The ITS Digital Archive consists of more than 30 million documents both from the Nazi time and the years after liberation. The archive includes numerous files related to forced labour, among them index cards of companies, insurances, labour offices and post-war registers. Many documents are personal and are related to former forced labourers, specific cities, areas or companies. They are thus not only relevant sources for research, but also for education. The Winter School comprised lectures, seminars, workshops with archival documents and guided tours. It encouraged the participants to discuss and evaluate their former experiences and to develop further ideas on the topic. The program was supplemented by time slots enabling the participants to investigate specific questions of interest or to work on individual research projects.

A welcome dinner in Berlin-Friedrichshain on Sunday night provided an opportunity to welcome the participants of the Winter School in an informal setting. Monday morning was dedicated to the presentation of the conceptual framework of the seminar. The program organisers TANJA VAITULEVICH (Berlin), ELISABETH SCHWABAUER (Bad Arolsen), and AKIM JAH (Bad Arolsen/Berlin) discussed the program and gave an overview of the topic and its broader context. The participants used the opportunity to introduce themselves and their educational work, and to exchange their individual experiences related to the subject. In the afternoon SEBASTIAN GERHARDT (Berlin) introduced the group to the topic of Nazi forced labour. His guided tour offered the participants both a first impression of the historical premises as well as an insight into the making of the exhibition ‘Forced Labour in the Daily Round 1938-1945’. The following evaluation revealed a need for discussion pertaining particularly to the question of ‘authenticity’ and the representation of history at ‘historical sites’, as well as approaches to self-reflective teaching and learning.

Day two focused the topic of digital media and the work with archival documents. DOROTHEE WEIN (Berlin) introduced the Online Archive and Digital Learning Platform of the Centre for Digital Systems (Cedis) at the Freie Universität Berlin. The discussion evolved mainly around the possibilities and limits of using online learning environments and oral testimony as teaching material. The participants’ own teaching experience which such media revealed a mostly positive view on digital archives and media, thus also pointing to the necessity of treating oral testimony as a historical source with care. In the afternoon ELISABETH SCHWABAUER and AKIM JAH gave an outline of the history of the ITS and its’ own archival material. Afterwards the participants presented and discussed documents from the ITS Digital Archive which they had requested individually from the ITS colleagues preceding the project week. Most of the participants had chosen topics related to their respective place of residence or work, but some also asked for relevant documents concerning artists who were deported by force. The discussion revealed the variety of the different ITS documents, and their geographical latitude both regarding the place of origin of former forced labourers, as well as the place of work or incarceration. The work with individual documentation was of great interest for most participants as it demonstrated promising opportunities for approaching individual life stories. Still, some questions remained open such as to what extend personal documents could be used for a more generalized perspective on the history of forced labour.

On Wednesday morning SEBASTIAN GERHARDT introduced the group to methodological approaches used within the educational workshops offered by the Topographie of Terror and the Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre. Gerhardt emphasised his personal access to the topic by pointing to what he paraphrased as Verfremdungseffekt (distancing effect), referring to Berthold Brecht’s literary concept. This approach is meant to enable the workshop participants to dig into personal histories by stepping back from their object of research from time to time to prevent an ‘over-identification’. Most participants agreed on the advantages of workshops that allow students to discover history by asking and searching instead of confronting them with input alone (learning by exploring/reflective learning). Later on, the ITS staff put their own workshop methods to the test by asking the participants to split into groups and investigate into archival documents on different topics, such as the ’”Racial” Treatment of Forced Labourers’, ‘Treatment of Pregnancies’ and ‘Postwar research by the Allies’. Both approaches made clear that a grounded contextualization is needed when working with historical documents in order to bridge the topic’s complexity and to avoid misinterpretation.

On Thursday morning TANJA VAITULEVICH, project coordinator of the International Youth Centre in the Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre, gave an overview of the international educational programs which took place in 2015 and 2016 at the Centre’s premises. International encounter projects for high school students and international summer camps aimed at teaching the history of Nazi forced labour to a younger generation using creative methods (theatre, photography) and strengthening a transnational perspective on the subject. The participants were particularly impressed by the bilateral projects run by the Centre, such as a German-Belarusian exchange project ‘Searching Traces of the Past’. As part of the program German and Belarusian pupils conducted life-story interviews with former forced labourers from Belarus, and accompanied them to the places of their forced deployment in Berlin. In the second part of the project the participants visited the witnesses in their Belarusian homes. Another project brought together young educators from Germany and South Korea. In transnational teams the group prepared educational material on the topic for the use in German and South Korean classrooms. The participants used sources on Nazi forced labour as well as material on South Korean ‘comfort women’, women forced into sexual slavery under Japanese occupation before and during WWII. This particular example illustrated explicitly the need for comparative, multi-directional aspirations when dealing with the topic of forced labour.

Subsequently, DANIELA GEPPERT (DZNSZA), deputy director of the Documentation Centre, introduced the topic of Italian Military Internees (IMI), a very distinct group of forced labourers under Nazi rule. More than 600.000 former Italian soldiers were deported to the German Reich when the German-Italian alliance broke in autumn 1943. Whilst the status of POWs was denied to those detainees, the IMI were treated as ‘traitors’ and became subject of forced labour and harsh discrimination. On the basis of the Centre’s newly opened permanent exhibition on the subject, Geppert gave a short substantial introduction followed by focusing on curatorial and methodological aspects of the exhibition itself. During a guided tour, the participants were made familiar with the current state of research and had the chance to discuss pedagogical and didactic questions. The problem of memory and commemoration in a transnational context as well as the history of the IMI as a marginalized topic emerged as central points of the discussion.

In the afternoon SEBASTIAN GERHARDT took the group on a guided bus tour through the centre of Berlin, including sites of Third Reich history as well as monuments connected to the Cold War and post-war memory. The tour was concluded by a walk through the permanent exhibition of the Documentation Centre ‘Topography of Terror’. Gerhardt used the opportunity for illustrating didactic problems connected to working with Nazi photography, making the participants aware of possible reasons for the misinterpretation of visual historical material.

The last day of the Winter School was dedicated to contemporary issues closely related to Nazi forced labour as a historical phenomenon. HENNING BORGGRÄFE (Bad Arolsen), ITS head of research and education, gave a talk on ‘Memory and Compensation for Former Nazi Forced Labourers’. Borggräfe outlined the development of compensation claims, leading from the 1960s to the so called ‘new debates’ in the 1980s. The speaker further depicted the role of forced labourers as long ‘forgotten victims’ by tracing the shifts within the discourse on compensation payments in both, the German and international context. As became clear from Borggräfe’s remarks, self-organisation and rigid claims by former forced labourers up to and during the 1990s had a significant impact on the recent evolvement of international negotiations and a growing engagement in coming to terms with the past. Yet, as the talk illustrated profoundly, the current shift from compensation to memory must be seen with care, as many former forced labourers and other victims of the Nazi atrocities are still in urgent need of social, medical, and material assistance.

Friday afternoon allowed for the evaluation of the Winter School and a more comprehensive discussion on advantages and disadvantages of the approaches and methods presented during the week. The participants were asked to discuss if and how they would integrate any of the educational practices suggested into their own programs, and to pose structural or didactical problems that might arise when integrating the topic of Nazi forced labour into educational colloquia. As became clear from the diverse comments, Nazi forced labour is still perceived as a relatively marginalised topic considering other historical aspects treated as more relevant in most European countries. Yet, the group mostly agreed on the need to provide more space for the subject of forced labour within educational colloquia. Most participants were convinced by the idea to integrate archival documents, as provided by the ITS, into their educational programs and to apply oral testimony for didactical purposes. Particularly the role of the IMI seems to pose some challenges for educators due to its notably complex historical framework and for constituting an even more specific issue within the seldom taught subject of Nazi forced labour. After all, the case of the IMI might be of special interest for Italian-German bilateral educational programs as the participants from Italy emphasised, thus embodying a chance to shed light on this part of the history also in Italy. Another result of the Winter School was the participants’ proposition to create an online platform for further exchanging educational approaches and personal experiences.1

The program was concluded by an optional visit of the German-Russian Museum Karlshorst on Saturday morning offered by Sebastian Gerhardt.

Conference Overview:

Introduction to the workshop (Tatsiana Vaitulevich, Elisabeth Schwabauer, Akim Jah)

Introduction to the topic (Tatsiana Vaitulevich, Elisabeth Schwabauer, Akim Jah)

Educational Approaches to Nazi Forced Labour I: Introduction to the Documentation Centre and Guided Tour (Sebastian Gerhardt)

Reflections and discussion

Educational Approaches to Nazi Forced Labour II: Digital Media – presentation of the Online Archive and Digital Learning Platform of the Centre for Digital Systems (CEDIS) at Free University Berlin (Dorothee Wein)

Introduction to the International Tracing Service (ITS) (Akim Jah, Elisabeth Schwabauer)

Presentation and discussing of ITS documents on Forced Labour (Akim Jah, Elisabeth Schwabauer)

Reflection and discussion

Movie Night with discussion: Das Schweigen der Quandts (The Silence of the Quandts)

Educational Approaches to Nazi Forced Labour III: Educational Programs at the Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre (Sebastian Gerhardt, Tatsiana Vaitulevich)

Educational Approaches to Nazi Forced Labour IV: Workshop – Working with ITS documents (Akim Jah, Elisabeth Schwabauer)

Reflection and discussion

Individual research in the ITS database

Presentation of the International Youth Centre at the Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre Berlin-Schöneweide (Tatsiana Vaitulevich)

Educational Approaches to Nazi Forced Labour V: ‘Between Two Stools. The Story of the Italian Military Internees’ – Guided tour and discussion (Daniela Geppert)

Individual research in the databases and visit of the exhibitions

City Tour Berlin – National Socialism and Cold War – and visit of the foundation Topographie des Terrors (Sebastian Gerhardt)

Time for individual research, use of the library, visit of the center’s exhibitions

‘Memory and Compensation for former Nazi Forced Laborers’ – Lecture by Henning Borggräfe (Head of Research and Education at the ITS)

Closing Discussion and evaluation

Farewell dinner

Visit of the German-Russian Museum in Berlin-Karlshorst (Sebastian Gerhardt)

Note:
1 Web-Blog by the participants: https://forcedlabour.tumblr.com/; Pictures: https://www.flickr.com/photos/93394890@N08/sets/72157680468386936/ (15.09.2017).