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VWI invites/goes to...

 

Cycle of VWI Fellows’ Colloquia

 

The VWI fellows present their intermediary research results in the context of colloquia which are announced to a small audience and are open to a public audience with an academic and topical interest. The lectures are complemented by a response or commentary by an expert in the given field and are discussed with the other fellows.

 

Due to the previous lack of an appropriate space, the colloquia were held at other Viennese research and cultural institutions with a topical or regional connection to the given subject. From this circumstance was born the “VWI goes to …” format.

 

With the move to a new institute building at Rabensteig 3, the spatial circumstances have changed, so that the VWI is now happily able to invite other research and cultural institutions. Therefore, the VWI is now conducting its colloquia both externally and within its own building, in the framework of continued co-operation with other institutions.

 

The new cycle of fellows’ colloquia “VWI invites/goes to …” is not only able to reach a broader circle of interested persons, but moreover integrates the VWI further into the Viennese scholarly establishment, perhaps even crossing borders into the greater regional research landscape.

 

 

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VWI invites/goes to...
Vojin Majstorovic: The Red Army and the Holocaust, 1939–1948
   

Monday, 20. November 2017, 13:30 - 15:00

Inst. für Wirtschafts-, Sozial- und Unternehmensgeschichte, Karl Franzens Universität Graz, Universitätsstr. 15, SR15.24

 

VWI goes to University Graz

The presentation examines the Soviet military’s encounter with the Shoah. The geographical scope of the study covers all territories where the Holocaust liberated and occurred and which the Red Army occupied, including the western parts of the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Bulgaria. It engages and builds on two sets of scholarly literatures: Soviet responses to the Holocaust and the Western allied armies’ encounter with the genocide of Jews.

IMG MajstorovicThe presentation explores how the Soviet military confronted the Shoah, addressing the Kremlin and the Red Army’s reactions to the Holocaust from above. More specifically, it describes how the Red Army, which occupied vast territories home to hundreds of thousands of Jewish Holocaust survivors, approached the issues critical to survivors, such as the high command’s policies towards perpetrators of anti-Jewish violence, property taken from the Jews by their gentile neighbours, and Jewish emigration.

The presentation also discusses soldiers and officers’ responses to the Holocaust from below, illuminating how much ordinary soldiers knew of Nazi policies towards the Jews, how they perceived the perpetrators, and whether popular antisemitism shaped how they viewed the victims. Importantly, the study pays attention to how half a million Jews who served in the Red Army reacted to the genocide of their fellow Jews. Furthermore, it traces the fate of Jews who were freed by the Red Army from the Nazi clutches in the post-war period and their interactions with Soviet soldiers and officers. The research is based on archival records from the former Soviet Union, Central Europe, the Balkans, and American Jewish organisations. It also relies on personal Jewish and Soviet sources, such as interviews, memoirs, diaries, and letters.

Introduced by Stefan Karner
Commented by Barbara Stelzl-Marx

Vojin Majstorovic is currently Research Fellow at the VWI. He received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2017. His research focuses on Soviet involvement in the Balkans and Central Europe in the 1940s. Before taking up the research fellowship at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, he held fellowships at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC and at the Centre for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich.

Barbara Stelzl-Marx is deputy director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research into Consequences of War (BIK), Graz – Vienna – Raabs, and vice-president of the UNESCO Commission, Vienna. She studied history, Russian and English/American studies in Graz, Oxford, Volgograd and at Stanford University. In 2010, she finished her prize-winning habilitation in contemporary history. She has published extensively, e.g. the monography Stalins Soldaten in Österreich. Die Innensicht der sowjetischen Besatzung (2012) and Besatzungskinder. Die Nachkommen alliierter Soldaten in Österreich und Deutschland (2015), that she edited together with Silke Satjukow.

Click here to download the invitiation as a PDF file.

In cooperation with:

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The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) is funded by:

 

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