The Holocaust and Migration: Beyond Flight und Displacement

Tagung

21.05.2023 – 23.05.2023

Description:

The proposed Conference (21 - 23 May 2023) sits at the crossroads of Holocaust and Migration Studies and intends to bring together new scholarship on both topics.

The conference seeks to examine how flight, migration, removal, resettlement, displacement and other varieties of “migration” have been part of the preparation, organization and execution of the Holocaust and its aftermath. It will explore how population movement and displacement were an essential part of the Holocaust experience and will try to identify how fresh research in both fields can speak to each other and may open up a new venue to understand the Holocaust. While the event will have a focus on Jewish History, it intends to look beyond the persecution, collection and forced flight of Jews alone. After all, the racially motivated removal, destruction and murder of Jews is connected with displacement, the destruction of leadership and community, the loss of social networks in the larger community. Jewish persecution and removal was part of a larger racial design, that also required massive settlement and population exchanges of non-Jews and doomed East Europeans (including POWs) to slave-labor in Germany.

Such a comprehensive analysis of the intersection between the Holocaust and phenomena of migration during this period is currently missing in historiography. Therefore, we would like to address larger questions such as: How can research on migration during the Holocaust illuminate the latter and vice-versa? How did displacement increase the vulnerability and complicity of populations? Were there opportunities for escape and flight from the Holocaust and under what circumstances? What roles played citizenship, gender and race in the intersection of migration and the Holocaust? Did the destruction by the Holocaust also destroy the memory of those uprooted?