“The Useless People”: War Crimes, Judgment, (Non)Memory
Nazi Torture of Inmates in Psychiatric Hospitals and Institutions for Sick children and the Disabled in Occupied Ukraine in the Light of Postwar Trials and Commemorative Initiatives

A joint publication project of the Ukraina Moderna journal and the EVZ Foundation

Guest editors of the UM Special Issue:

Tanya Penter (Heidelberg, Germany)
Olena Petrenko (Bochum, Germany)
Andrii Usach (Lviv, Ukraine)
Albert Wenger (Dnipro city, Ukraine)

During the Second World War and German occupation the population of Ukraine sustained enormous losses, with over three million civilian victims of Nazi violence. While Holocaust research has been one of the prominent subjects of the historiography of WWII in Ukraine during past decades, other aspects of Nazi activity are only beginning to be investigated academically, e.g., genocide of the Roma. Moreover, today there are still entire categories of victims that have yet to be studied in any detail. Foremost among them are the inmates of psychiatric hospitals and institutions for sick children and the disabled, who were killed en masse throughout the occupied Ukrainian territories. Neither the statistics of the slaughter and identification of the perpetrators, nor the numbers of victims or any particulars concerning their memorialization have been researched as a separate topic.

The present publication project is dedicated to a study of these forgotten victims of the Second World War.
We invite the submission of articles in the following subject areas:
- Mass murder of psychiatric hospital inmates and patients in institutions for the disabled in the context of the Holocaust and other manifestations of Nazi violence in occupied Ukraine;
- (De)centralized euthanasia? Mechanisms for mass murder: Orders from the top and initiatives from below;
- Unwanted children: orphanages and pediatric institutions during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine;
- Lack of sources on Nazi violence against the civilian population: Criticism of abusive practices;
- German and local criminality: Regionally specific crimes;
- Postwar criminal prosecution in the USSR of Nazi criminals and local collaborators: Between the legal process and the political manipulation;
- Obscurity and the unknown victims: Commemorative practices in Soviet and post-Soviet times for the inmates of psychiatric hospitals and institutions for sick children and disabled persons.

We kindly ask you to express your interest in contributing to the issue by sending ap. 500-word abstract and author information by February 15, 2019, to editorial board of Ukraina Moderna: editorial.board[a]uamoderna.com
Timeline
- Submission deadline: June 1, 2019
- Texts revised upon the reviewers’ comments: September 1, 2019