Abstract: In diesem Sommer zeigte sich besonders deutlich, dass die Angriffe auf die Erinnerung die Arbeit der Gedenkstätten massiv behindern. Wöchentlich wurden zuletzt Hakenkreuz-Schmierereien in Buchenwald entdeckt. Das Thema verschwand dennoch für den Moment aus dem medialen Fokus. Der Grund: Am 7. Oktober überfiel die Terrororganisation Hamas die israelische Zivilbevölkerung. Der 7. Oktober bedeutet eine tiefgreifende Zäsur in der Geschichte Israels – mit drastischen Auswirkungen auch für Jüdinnen*Juden in Deutschland.
Das hat auch viel mit dem Thema dieses Lagebilds zu tun, wie aktuelle Vorfälle zeigen. Sie machen deutlich, wie das Gedenken an den Nationalsozialismus angegriffen wird, um gegen den Staat Israel zu agitieren. Israelbezogener Antisemitismus und Post-Shoah-Antisemitismus gehen oft Hand in Hand.Wegen Angriffen auf die Erinnerung von allen Seiten bekommt die Gedenkkultur Risse.
Die extreme Rechte will diese Risse im Gedenken. Risse werden mit der Zeit größer und tiefer. Spätestens 2017, mit der Dresdener Rede Höckes, wurde deutlich: Die extreme Rechte will noch mehr. Sie will die Gedenkkultur einreißen und dagegen eine Erinnerung setzen, die die Verbrechen der Nationalsozialisten relativiert. Das hat den Effekt, dass Gedenkstätten immer öfter zum Ziel von Angriffen und Vandalismus werden.
Momentan wird die Rolle der extremen Rechten kaum diskutiert, weil der Blick – aus gutem Grund – auf die islamistischen und linken Gruppierungen gerichtet ist, die den Hamas-Terror verherrlichen und eine Grundlage für weitere antisemitische Vorfälle in Deutschland schaffen. Im Windschatten der Terror-Verherrlichung setzt die extreme Rechte ihre Angriffe auf die Erinnerung fort. In der Gedenkstätte Ahlem in Hannover (Niedersachsen) wurden Ende Oktober mehrere Gedenktafeln mit Aufklebern überklebt. Neben „Befreie dich vom Schuldkult“ war ein Aufkleber mit einer Palästina-Fahne und den Worten „Free Palestine End Israeli Occupation“ zu lesen. Ein Aufkleber der Neonazi-Gruppierung Junge Nationalisten zeigte eine blutige Israel-Fahne mit der Parole „Israel mordet und die Welt schaut zu“.
Immer wieder wird der Krieg gegen Israel mit Angriffen auf die Erinnerung verknüpft. Das Zivilgesellschaftliche Lagebild Antisemitismus #12 nimmt die Risse in der Erinnerung an den Nationalsozialismus in den Blick und ergänzt die aktuell geführte Antisemitismuskritik um eine spezifisch deutsche Facette: Jede Art von Antisemitismus in diesem Land bringt auch einen Ruf nach einem Schlussstrich mit sich.
Abstract: Transnistria, meaning “beyond the Dniester”, was an artificial geographic term created during the Second World War, referring to a region in the Ukraine that was situated between the Dniester River on the west and the Bug River on the east, also extending southward to the Black Sea. During October and November 1941, thousands of terrorized Jews, mostly without food and water, were deported on foot or by wagon to Transnistria. Depending on whose numbers one uses, between 120,000 and 180,000 Jews were deported to Transnistria from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Of this group, only 50,000 would survive the war.
For years, the fate of the Jews in Transnistria was not emphasized in Holocaust remembrance, education, or commemoration. The reasons for this were manifold. They included problems of documentation; attitudes of Eastern European governments until the transition of the 1990s; priorities of major Holocaust memorial organizations until that transition; activities, primarily internally focused, of the survivor organizations from Bukovina, Bessarabia, and Transnistria; and, finally, the dynamics among Jewish survivors from Romania as they reassembled their lives in the first postwar decades. All this contributed to Transnistria becoming “the forgotten Holocaust”.
As the last Jewish survivors of the Transnistrian ghettos and camps reached their eighth and ninth decades at the beginning of the 21st century, various political, social, educational, and demographic factors coalesced, changing pre-existing dynamics regarding the memory of Transnistria. In this chapter, I focus on these factors, showing how and why this “forgotten Holocaust” is slowly being remembered again.
Abstract: Public engagement with the Holocaust in Romania has developed slowly and unevenly, shaped by decades of political constraint and institutional silence. Until 1989, restricted archival access and an antifascist ideological framework marginalized the specificity of Jewish persecution, subsuming it under a generalized narrative of “victims of fascism”. A substantive public acknowledgment of Romania’s responsibility emerged only in 2004, with the adoption of the Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania. This belated recognition profoundly influenced the spatial articulation of memory in Bucharest.
The chapter examines the fragmented mnemonic landscape of the city through a theoretical distinction between imprints and places. Imprints are material interventions – monuments, plaques, museums – that inscribe historical facts into public space. While essential for visibility and moral acknowledgment, they operate largely as static markers. Places, by contrast, are urban sites whose latent memory is reactivated through collective engagement. Rather than merely preserving the past, they generate memory through interaction, interpretation, and embodied experience.
Through case studies – including Giurgiului Cemetery, the Bucharest Holocaust Memorial (2009), and the Memorial to the Martyrs of the Bucharest Pogrom (2016) – the chapter traces the transition from enclosed, community-bound remembrance to civic visibility. It then analyzes the pedagogical project PLACES (2021), developed with architecture students, which reconstructed the prewar addresses of the 125 pogrom victims and reinscribed them into the contemporary city through mapping, archival research, and digital interfaces.
By shifting attention from sites of death to spaces of everyday life, PLACES exemplifies a performative model of remembrance grounded in secondary witnessing. The study argues that, in the absence of living testimony, urban space itself becomes a medium of memory – capable not only of conserving history but of ethically reactivating it within the present.
Abstract: Polish-Jewish relations, rather good in pre-partition Poland, deteriorated in the mid-19th century, and even more in the Second Republic (1919-39) with its exclusivist nationalism. The wartime period was marked by strong anti-Jewish moods in Poland; antisemitism was a "legitimate" stance within the resistance movement. However, many Poles helped Jews. Between 1944-48 Polish rulers conducted politics favorable toward Jews, but they used the Jewish issue as a tool in their struggle against the old elite, which whipped up anti-Jewish sentiments. In the 1950s-60s the Holocaust was increasingly de-Judaized in Polish discourse; after 1968, when Poland engaged in the anti-Zionist campaign, Jews ceased to be mentioned at all. The genocide of the Jews began to be discussed in Poland only after 1978; the Solidarity movement used its memory in its struggle against the government. At the same time, popular antisemitism re-emerged. Now, many Poles object to what they see as over-emphasis of Jewish suffering and neglect of non-Jewish suffering under the Nazis.
Abstract: Burchett's article sheds light on the community of Facebook users who interact with posts by the populist far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), and how they respond to the AfD’s contradictory narratives regarding Jews and antisemitism. The AfD uses its online space to construct an everyday reality of victimhood for its political community, which conditionally includes Jews. Jewish victimhood and inclusion are emphasized by the AfD when they fit its political aims, such as focusing on ‘Muslim-Arab’ antisemitism to underline an anti-immigration stance, but are minimized when Jewish victimhood is perceived to threaten non-Jewish German victimhood, as it is seen to do in the context of Holocaust remembrance. Burchett compares comment threads from these two thematic streams and finds that, regardless of the difference in victimhood framing by the AfD, users in both streams react with similar narratives of defensive, competitive and rejective victimhood, as well as a reluctance to include Jews in their in-group of victims, even when the AfD explicitly includes them. Her paper argues that so-called ‘secondary’ antisemitism, Jewish exclusion as a result of resistance to Holocaust guilt, also has an effect on contemporary Jewish victimhood.
Abstract: Wenn eine KI-generierte Anne Frank im Feed auftaucht, DJs in der Gaskammer auflegen, die AfD Tipps zur Ahnenforschung gibt und Israel zur neuen Chiffre des Bösen wird: Geschichtsbilder von jungen Menschen werden heute maßgeblich im Netz, durch Videospiele und digitale Anwendungen geprägt. Doch die Gefahren werden bislang noch viel zu wenig beleuchtet – und die Potenziale und Chancen, die sich durch digitale Geschichtsvermittlung ergeben, sind noch längst nicht voll ausgeschöpft.
In unserem Report „Der Holocaust als Meme“ stellen wir einige Beispiele geschichtsrevisionistischer Inhalte in digitalen Medien vor, die in unseren Augen eine breitere Öffentlichkeit brauchen – sei es, weil sie besonders große Reichweiten erzielen, besonders subtilen Strategien folgen oder zu schon bedenklich normalisierten Formen alternativhistorischer Erzählungen gehören. Die aufgeführten Beispiele und Analysen dienen dazu, zentrale Beobachtungen, wiederkehrende Muster und exemplarische Phänomene im Umgang mit Geschichte in digitalen Räumen zu veranschaulichen.
Ein besonderer Fokus liegt auf den Plattformen Instagram und TikTok, da sie zu den reichweitenstärksten und einflussreichsten Social-Media-Kanälen unter Jugendlichen und jungen Erwachsenen zählen. Neben sozialen Medien beziehen wir uns auch auf digitale Spiele mit historischem Setting.
Abstract: В статье рассматриваются фольклорные версии, объясняющие ненависть Гитлера к евреям. Рассматриваемые тексты зафиксированы в основном на территориях, входивших в черту оседлости, от людей старшего возраста, которые или сами контактировали с евреями, преимущественно до войны, или много слышали о них из уст родителей. Версии сводятся к одной из трех объяснительных стратегий: среди ближайших родственников Гитлера или его сослуживцев был еврей, на которого Гитлер был сильно обижен и по этой причине стал мстить всему народу; или ненависть вызвана особенностями самих евреев, которые, согласно этническим стереотипам славян, умнее, хитрее, ленивее немцев и славян, а также могут понимать немецкий язык. Наконец, Катастрофа может объясняться евангельскими событиями. Во всех трех случаях в рассказах о причинах, повлекших Холокост, используются разработанные традицией механизмы осмысления окружающего мира: этноконфессиональные стереотипы, сюжетные клише традиционной квазиисторической фольклорной прозы, объединенные с попытками индивидуальной интерпретации.
Abstract: Статья посвящена активистам памяти о Холокосте в современной России. Материалом для статьи послужили 20 интервью с активистами памяти о Холокосте, записанные на бывших оккупированных территориях (Северный Кавказ, Калмыкия, Брянская и Псковская области) в 2020–2023 гг. Несмотря на возрастающий интерес memory studies к мемориальному активизму, сами активисты памяти – их мотивы, их социальные и биографические характеристики – до сих пор не становились объектом специального интереса исследователей. Российские активисты памяти о Холокосте не принадлежат к одной этнической группе и не объединены общими политическими взглядами. В статье показано, что многих активистов объединяет «отделенность» от локального сообщества: несмотря на разный социальный и этнический бэкграунд, они являются для местного сообщества «чужими» по тем или иным параметрам. Эта «отделенность» связана как с природой локального активизма в целом, так и со статусом Холокоста в советско-российской культуре памяти, где поддержание памяти о его жертвах не является обычным и самоочевидным занятием. Нередко стимулом к активизму становится столкновение с иной, «космополитичной» культурой памяти, где Холокост мыслится как одно из важнейших событий Второй мировой войны и существует моральный императив помнить о его жертвах. В статье также выделены и проанализированы мотивы активизма.
Abstract: Представленное в статье исследование посвящено репрезентации памяти о Холокосте в медиа Центрально-Восточной и Северной Европы во втором десятилетии XXI века (на примере Германии, Австрии, Польши, Литвы, Латвии, Эстонии, Швеции, Дании, Норвегии). В соответствии с гипотезой авторов, в каждом из этих государств существует особая память о Второй мировой войне, которая встраивается в национальные нарративы, но сочетается с глобальной памятью о Холокосте (механизм, ранее описанный Д. Леви и Н. Шнайдером). Сравнение образа Холокоста в различных публикациях СМИ позволило выяснить общие интерпретации и национальную специфику нарратива о трагедии, уточнить его значение для разных социальных групп. Целью исследования стало выявление особенностей сочетания глобальной и локальной памяти о Холокосте в Центрально-Восточной и Северной Европе в 2010-е гг. Источниками исследования являются отобранные по ключевым словам материалы СМИ 2011, 2018 и 2020 гг. Методологическую основу работы составляет концепция «мест памяти» П. Нора и развивающая ее концепция «общих мест памяти» в интерпретации Р. Трабы, через призму которой можно рассматривать память о Холокосте в различных национальных контекстах, а также дискурс-анализ (в соответствии с подходом Э. Лаклау и Ш. Муфф). В результате исследования было определено, что память о Холокосте играет большую роль для национальных нарративов. Она встраивается в цепочки эквивалентности с другими событиями локальной и всемирной истории, сопоставляется с геноцидами других народов. Через дискурс о Холокосте происходит формирование представлений о Второй мировой войне и праворадикальных движениях. При этом в публикациях проявляется и глобальная память о Холокосте, противодействие его релятивизации. Эта последняя тенденция связана прежде всего с деятельностью переживших Холокост граждан самих рассматриваемых в работе стран.
Abstract: Статья посвящена актуальным практикам памяти Холокоста в разных городах России. Исследование построено на полевых материалах, собранных в результате экспедиций, которые состоялись в 2020–2023 гг. в рамках проекта «Еврейские коммеморативные практики и современный культ Победы». Экспедиционная работа велась в разных городах на Западе и Юге России. Участники проекта посетили более 20 населенных пунктов, в которых записали несколько сотен интервью с членами еврейских общин, краеведами, работниками культуры и другими людьми, интересующимися памятью об оккупации и Холокосте. Внимание автора статьи привлекло то, что в разных городах по-разному рассказывали о посещении памятников жертвам Холокоста, особенно то, что в одних городах для жителей был важен день расстрела, а в других его даже не знали. Автор статьи задалась вопросом: в какие дни в разных населенных пунктах проходят акции памяти погибших евреев и от чего зависит выбор дня посещения памятника. Проанализировав собранный материал, она выделила три модели, к которым тяготеют практики поминовения жертв Холокоста: поминовение в день расстрела (или другой вариант: в традиционные поминальные еврейские дни); поминовение в контексте памяти о Великой Отечественной войне – в День Победы или день освобождения города; поминовение в контексте международной памяти о Холокосте – 27 января или на Йом ха-Шоа.
Abstract: Historical commissions have played an important role in the most recent efforts to garner restitution and reparations for Holocaust victims and their families. Several dozen Holocaust commissions were convened in the late‑1990s and early‑2000s in European countries where histories of collaboration and complicity with the Nazi regime were either under‑documented or suppressed in the official discourse. This essay examines the Holocaust commissions from a historiographical perspective with special attention given to the methodological and rhetorical strategies they employed when confronted by the traumatic experiences and memories of victims and survivors. While the work of these commissions was shaped and influenced, to varying degrees, by external political forces and interest groups, this essay explores the ways in which “the politics of history” entered into their written reports and, consequently, obscured and silenced fundamental aspects of Holocaust history. Three commissions, in particular, are held up for scrutiny (i.e., Austria’s Jabloner Commission, the International Commission for Holocaust‑Era Insurance Claims, and France’s Mattéoli Commission), and an assessment of their work is given against the backdrop of ongoing debates within the field of trauma studies and in response to questions concerning the Holocaust and the “limits of representation.”
Abstract: The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum received two million visitors in 2019, making it the most heavily visited museum in Poland. This entry situates tourism at Auschwitz within the broader context of Holocaust tourism by providing an historical account of the phenomenon. It begins with those visitors to the camp before 1945 who were not tourists (Nazi officials, local suppliers, engineers), drawing attention to tourism’s ethical ambiguity. Since the museum’s 1947 opening, tourists have encountered a site undergoing continual development, its exhibition spaces and its messaging evolving from the Stalinist era through the Cold War to the present period. This chapter considers how shifts in the site’s memory politics, especially regarding the representation of different victim groups, have led to unresolved tensions that still surface during the tour. It then considers some present-day challenges to the legitimacy of tourism at Auschwitz, such as visitor behaviour or the difficulties in providing an appropriate, authentic, and informative experience to large crowds. Finally, the chapter reviews different scholarly approaches to Holocaust tourism, such as dark tourism theory and empirical visitor research, before concluding with questions for future research into Auschwitz tourism.
Abstract: The chapter addresses the key problem of Polish collective memory of Auschwitz, that is, how Poles perceive the former camp, in a wider context of Polish memory of World War II, Nazi camps, and the Holocaust. It presents and discusses results of surveys representative of Poland’s population, particularly two designed by the authors and conducted in 2020. The surveys show that the war is the major theme of Polish collective memory, and Nazi camps in general and Auschwitz in particular belong to top Polish lieux de mémoire. Auschwitz evokes in Poles mostly general and universalist associations with destruction, murder, crematoria, gas chambers, and death. The Holocaust is spontaneously associated with Auschwitz only rarely. On the other hand, the camp is the most frequently associated site of the destruction of Jews. The Polish collective memory of Auschwitz hinges upon a poor awareness of the number, nationality, and countries of origin of the camp’s victims. However, Poles are aware of the major historical functions of the camp and share different symbolic meanings of it. Some survey results suggest that a cosmopolitan Holocaust memory focusing on Auschwitz developed among Poles while others indicate that the Polish memory of Auschwitz has nationalist characteristics.
Abstract: This article examines how local complicity in the Holocaust is negotiated, silenced, and revealed through the spatial memoryscape of Rajgród, a small town in northeastern Poland where Poles participated in the murder of their Jewish neighbors in the summer of 1941. Using a microhistorical lens, it analyzes how knowledge, denial, and memory are inscribed in physical spaces and communal practices, rendering space a cultural text. Drawing on personal and municipal records and ethnographic fieldwork, the article shows how Catholicism, nationalism, and ritual symbolism shape collective remembrance and moral hierarchies of suffering in post-socialist Eastern Europe.
Abstract: The past is never past, wrote William Faulkner. The great American writer had in mind his native Mississippi, but he might as well have written those words about Poland. Indeed, among history-conscious Poles, the findings of historians have had far-reaching social and political consequences that transcend the esoteric discussions of scholars. This was corroborated in recent times by the emergence of a discourse in Poland over what some have called polityka historyczna (Geschichtspolitik, or history policy), which focuses on the question of whether historians who write of the less glorious episodes in Polish history are actually acting against the interests of the nation. Many Polish historians, including the best-known scholars among them, have protested against this suggestion, which poses a clear danger to the fidelity of their discipline. The dissolution of the Communist regime in Poland at the end of the 1980s made possible the deconstruction of every aspect of contemporary history. The process of reconstruction, begun in earnest, proved to be complex and painful. This was particularly the case when dealing with the bitterest chapters in the millennial story of Polish-Jewish relations, which were, and continue to be, the subject of popular and intellectual discussion as well as serious scholarly research. Out of this process emerged a new understanding of history, one that renders much of the earlier canon on the topic virtually obsolete. It had, in fact, been under way for some years even before the collapse of Communism – especially in the pages of Poland’s extraordinarily vibrant underground press and also, to an impressive extent given the prevailing censorship, in those of Poland’s legally operated independent Catholic press. Polish émigré journals were also regularly smuggled into Poland and had significant influence. Nevertheless, it was only with the collapse of the old regime and the birth of Poland’s Third Republic that this activity could be carried out without interference and Poland could finally undergo its own Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past). This chapter discusses the evolution of Poland’s confrontation with the destruction of Polish Jewry.
Abstract: The terrain of the past remains a battleground in Ukraine, where policymakers, interest groups, and individuals continue to use and abuse history for contemporary gains. The recent escalation of Russian violence has only exacerbated these processes. Apart from discussions of Ukraine and Russia’s historical relations and the Holodomor, nothing looms larger than the Holocaust in Ukraine’s ongoing memory wars, whether in discussions and denials of local collaboration and complicity in anti-Jewish violence or exercises in comparative and/or competitive suffering. This article examines the Holocaust as it played out in Ukraine and the evolving memoryscapes that emerged in its wake, homing in on two major massacres, Babyn Yar and Bohdanivka, and their memorial afterlives in Soviet Ukraine (ca. 1945–91) and independent Ukraine (1991–today). While this project briefly engages the well-trod topics of local collaboration and competitive suffering, as evidenced in competing monuments on the site of Babyn Yar itself and the larger commemorative landscape of Kyiv, it draws attention to understudied sites like Bohdanivka, which fell within the Romanian occupation zone during the war.
Abstract: Holocaust Memorial Day 2026 reached more people than ever before, with millions engaging across the UK through national moments of remembrance, education and community activity. From Light the Darkness to events in schools, workplaces and public spaces, this year showed the growing impact of coming together to remember, learn and stand against all prejudice today.
Central to this was the Light the Darkness campaign, which saw 230 buildings and landmarks illuminated in purple at 8pm as part of a nationwide act of remembrance – an increase from 200 in 2025. Delivered in partnership with Ocean Outdoor and supported by JCDecaux, Global and Bauer Media, the campaign appeared on 3,000 billboards across the UK, generating over 10 million impacts\*. HMDT’s radio advert aired more than 900 times across Global’s network, reaching a further 14 million impacts.
Engagement also grew at community level, with 3,800 organisations marking HMD – up from 3,500 the previous year. This was mirrored by a surge in digital participation on the day, with social media interactions across HMDT’s Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn rising by 140%, from 10,000 in 2025 to 24,000 in 2026.
Crucially, the 2026 impact data highlights the reversal of a decline over the past two years in secondary school participation, which had previously attracted national concern. More than 1,000 secondary schools marked Holocaust Memorial Day this year – 17% of the total number of secondary schools nationwide, which increased from just 9% last year. This was further bolstered by the reach of the charity’s educational film, *It began with words*, which was viewed by over 130,000 pupils, helping ensure that the lessons of the Holocaust remain central to younger generations.
To take a deeper look at the key moments behind this year’s commemoration, read our Impact Report for Holocaust Memorial Day 2026. From a special event hosted by Their Majesties The King and Queen to acts of remembrance in communities across the UK, the report captures the scale and significance of HMD 2026.
Topics: Antisemitism: Right-Wing, Antisemitism: Muslim, Attitudes to Jews, Attitudes to Israel, Islamophobia, Antisemitism: Jewish Perceptions and Experiences, Holocaust Commemoration, Authoritarianism, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Populism, Politics: Political Parties, Politics
Abstract: In the early 2020s, two seemingly unrelated political developments came to a head in the Netherlands. First, in January 2020, then-Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the center-right VVD party issued an official apology on behalf of the Dutch government for its complicity in the deaths of more than 100,000 Dutch Jews in the Holocaust. Second, in the November 2023 national elections, Geert Wilders’s anti-Muslim, pro-Israel PVV party won the highest percentage of votes, leading to the formation of a far-right cabinet under Prime Minister Dick Schoof in July 2024. In this article, we argue that this double consolidation of the historical legacy of the Holocaust and of racist, right-wing politics has put Dutch Jews in a dangerous bind. On the one hand, the memory of the Holocaust and the contemporary safety of Dutch Jews have been elevated as a paramount concern in Dutch institutional, legal, and political life. On the other hand, Dutch Jews have been positioned as the perennial would-be victims of violent antisemitism—virtually always, it is falsely imagined, at the hands of Dutch Muslims. The historical persecution of the Jews in the Holocaust is now used to underwrite a “proprietary” form of Jewish victimhood in the present: non-Jewish white Dutch people position themselves as the saviors of Jews, and thereby claim ownership over their past, their collective fate, and the political means to secure their safety.
Abstract: Introduction. This study addresses the representation of ethnic minority cultures in online museum collections, which often reflect diverse viewpoints. We propose a data-driven methodology to construct a large-scale multi-viewpoint knowledge graph, using Jewish cultural heritage as a case study.
Method. We developed an LLM-based pipeline that combines object typing, named entity recognition, relation extraction, enrichment, and clustering.
Results. An analysis of 647,951 records and 178,444 extracted subjects from the collections of Jewish museums across the globe revealed diverse thematic emphases: Israel and the Netherlands prioritised religious themes, while others highlighted everyday life. Surprisingly, only Australia emphasised the Holocaust.
Conclusion(s). The central contribution of this study is the development of a knowledge organisation system capable of tracing major trends and identifying patterns in the polyvocality of perspectives. The methodology provides quantifiable, scalable analysis of multi-viewpoint cultural heritage, extendable to other minorities.
