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X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://www.historikertag.de/Bonn2025/programm/moving-the-dead-soil-as-public-space-for-political-struggles-over-the-re-interpretation-of-wwii-in-poland-belarus-ukraine-and-russia/
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UID:historikertag-2025-4367
DTSTAMP:20250322T225140Z
DTSTART:20250918T083000Z
DTEND:20250918T101000Z
SUMMARY:[Historikertag 2025] Moving the Dead. Soil as Public Space for Political Struggles over the Re-Interpretation of WWII in Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia
DESCRIPTION:This panel discusses the power relations between historiography, archeology, state driven memory politics, and civic responses to them. In the 21st century the soil containing human remains of those murdered in Central- and Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1945 saw a new phase of excavations, documentation and reburial. In the context of the ongoing Russian war of aggression against Ukraine we observe a further securitization of memory. In the context of hybrid warfare, the production of archeological evidence is used as a political resource in newly emerging memory wars. However, the strategy is not new: documentation of pits, bones and personal objects has fueled propaganda already during WWII. The authenticity, materiality and quantity of corpses was used as empirical reference for “establishing the truth” by state commissions by Germany and the Soviet Union.  
After Law and Justice came to power in Poland in 2015, the Institute of National Remembrance has made great efforts to use DNA samples to attribute anonymous burial sites to specific members of the Homeland Army. In Belarus and Russia a new wave of excavations has been underway since 2021, providing physical evidence for a new interpretation of German atrocities against the civilian population as genocide. The killing sites of more than 22.000 Polish officers murdered by the NKVD in 1940 continue to be subject of fierce debate about the relationship between German and Soviet crimes. These cases have in common that state representatives take action to use the soil as a public resonating space for their updated mnemonic politics. These are part of ideological struggles to reinterpret WWII and its long-term consequences in changing political and social contexts. Many of these activities raise concerns among civic actors in the field of memory activism or neighboring societies. 
Der Beitrag Moving the Dead. Soil as Public Space for Political Struggles over the Re-Interpretation of WWII in Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia erschien zuerst auf Historikertag 2025.
LOCATION:Hörsaal 9
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