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Ingolf Seidel

Ingolf Seidel has been working for the "Learning from History" educational portal since 2009 and is responsible for editing and project management. He conducts seminars on (historical) political education and designs educational modules.

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Beyond national cultures of remembrance

Trilateral seminars with Belarus, Poland and Germany
08 March 2021
Sincerely Media | Unsplash

Since the early 1950s, international exchange and encounter schemes have been an increasingly important form of youth education work in Germany. Bilateral events usually involve complicated visa requirements, which are accompanied by significant administrative work. In recent years there has been a noticeable increase in multilateral encounters.

Since the early 1950s, international exchange and encounter schemes have been an increasingly important form of youth education work in Germany. Bilateral events usually involve complicated visa requirements, which are accompanied by significant administrative work. In recent years there has been a noticeable increase in multilateral encounters. An example of a multilateral experience of this sort is the series of meetings of 30 young students from Poland, Belarus and Germany in 2017 and 2018 which involved the Leonid Levin History Workshop in Minsk, the International Youth Meeting Centre (IJBS) in Oświęcim/Auschwitz and the Bavarian Youth Council (BJR). Over the course of a year and a half, three five-day encounter seminars were held under the title of “Cultures of remembrance of the Second World War and the Holocaust: Poland, Belarus, Germany”.

Seminar topics: Dimensions of the German mass crimes and perpetration

During the meetings, various aspects of the different national reminiscences of the Second World War and the Holocaust were addressed. The particular focus was in each case selected by the local colleagues. In Poland the emphasis was on the historical site – the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp – and the way this is handled in cultural memory. In Minsk the focus was partly on remembrance in Belarus, which is still strongly coloured by a Soviet and heroic narrative, and partly on the historic sites of Maly Trostenets and Blagovshchina. Both are extermination sites near Minsk where people – mainly Jews, but also Soviet prisoners of war and suspected partisans – were murdered between 1942 and 1944. Trostenets was the largest extermination site in the occupied Soviet Union. Between 50,000 and 206,500 people were murdered here. A memorial complex, part-funded by Germany, was opened in 2018. The final seminar in Munich dealt with marginalised victim groups such as Sinti and Roma, homosexuals and Soviet prisoners of war and the way in which perpetration is handled. The participants considered these victim groups more closely during visits to the Dachau concentration camp memorial site and the nearby former SS shooting range in Hebertshausen, where more than 4,000 Soviet prisoners of war were murdered. Finally, a discussion with Niklas Frank, son of the Nazi governor-general in Poland, Hans Frank, focused on his critical examination of his deceased father’s life. Hans Frank was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials and hanged on 16 October 1946.

What are the special features of this sort of trilateral encounter?

A key feature is the fact that the participants came from two countries that were invaded by Germany during the Second World War. Belarus and Poland also share a history of conflict that goes back in particular to the inter-war period when the western part of Belarus belonged to Poland while the eastern part formed the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). Under the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union occupied eastern Poland in 1939. The western part of Belarus was subsequently ceded to the Byelorussian SSR. This topic was not included in the seminar in the form of a learning unit but it was addressed in discussions, without any territorial claims being formulated on either side. Instead, the participants were mainly interested in the way national borders cut through historical regions.

Two seminar issues were of particular interest to the Belarussian and Polish groups. The attention paid to the Soviet prisoners of war and the visit to the former SS shooting range carried emotional significance for the Belarussian participants. At the site the participants spontaneously organised a brief memorial ceremony that had an emotional impact on everyone present. Because the Soviet prisoners of war feature only marginally in western remembrance, the creation of an opportunity to remember them has special weight. For the Polish group, the meeting with Niklas Frank was an important and probably formative experience. Frank’s distance from his father made it possible to discuss issues of perpetration and the responsibility of later generations. This is a topic that also has an important bearing on the present for the participants from Germany, especially in the light of the growth of far-right political trends and parties.

The Working Group on Peace and Development (FriEnt) is an association of governmental organisations, church development agencies, civil society networks, and political foundations.

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