Internment Without Trial – Examples from the Soviet and Nazi Regimes

You are invited to come and experience a professional training course gathering around 45 history, heritage and citizenship educators from all over Europe, including Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ukraine and United Kingdom. The engaging programme aims to equip educators with adequate tools to raise awareness on the multi-faceted dimension of 20th-century European historical memory among youngsters. The participants will learn through workshops, on-site study visits, peer learning and debating how to address and teach about Europe’s totalitarian past with a special focus on internment as means of repression.
Participants are expected to be practitioners in history and heritage education with a working level of English, committed to work during the training with the other participants, and interested in future cross-border cooperation on history education.
The project proposes an alternative and meaningful way to teach and learn about Europe’s totalitarian past. One key feature common to both totalitarian regimes, with all due attention to their fundamental differences, is the deprivation of freedom through the internment and concentration of all whole groups of populations in places specially designed for this purpose. Former camps are the physical repository of layers of a painful European memory of denial of human dignity through internment and concentration of individuals. The project makes the topic of internment and concentration camps in 20th-century Europe thought-provoking and engaging for young people by equipping educators with innovative learner-centred resources on the topic which create bridges between the disciplines of history and citizenship.
The memory landscape of Nazi and Stalinist camps is immensely diverse, according to the variety of intentions, experiences and perceptions that were and are attached to these places. Many internment and concentration camps have been used for different purposes over time, sometimes being the place where perpetrators became victims and vice-versa.The training will showcase the online learning resource that is developed in the project. This resource uses Lamsdorf/Łambinowice and Buchenwald as examples of “Internment without a trial” from the Nazi and Soviet regimes. The Buchenwald Memorial and the Łambinowice Museum address these various layers of European memory in their educational work, and present the various ways and angles that have been adopted according to who was remembering whom in these places. The focus on these two sites embedded in the historical context and the bigger picture, will provide history, heritage and citizenship educators with unique means to explore the continually unfolding nature of memory with learners.
EUROCLIO coordinates the project in partnership with Stiftung Gedenkstätten Buchenwald und Mittelbau-Dora, the Central Prisoner of War Museum of Łambinowice-Opole and the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory associated with the Tallinn University Centre for History Didactics & Estonian Association of History Teachers.