Saturday, 5. May 2018, 18:00 - 20:00

Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, 1010 Vienna, Rabensteig 3, Research Lounge

This lecture will present the main results of a research project entitled “Forced Labour of Portuguese Citizens in the Third Reich”, which was carried out at the Institute of Contemporary History of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / New University of Lisbon by a research team coordinated by Professor Fernando Rosas.

First, it will address the question of the wartime labour force in Germany and the various forms of forced labour that were deployed. It will then seek to explain how Portuguese citizens – citizens of a neutral country – were caught up in the infernal web of forced labour in Nazi Germany.

This investigation undertaken in 2017 was motivated by and coincided with the first tribute given by the Portuguese state to the Portuguese victims of Nazi exploitation at the annual ceremony commemorating the liberation of the Mau­thausen concentration camp.

Fernando Rosas is Professor Emeritus of Contemporary History at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences (FCSH) of the New University of Lisbon (UNL) and a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History/UNL. He is the author of a large bibliography on the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of Portugal and Europe and the history of the Portuguese “Estado Novo” in particular.

He is the author and host of the TV history series on RTP2 and RTP Africa, “Historia a Historia” (2015) and “Historia a Historia -África” (2017-2018). He directed the international research project of the IHC and the exhibition in the Culture Centre of Belém (CCB), which ran from November 2017 to January 2018, on “Forced Labour of Portuguese Citizens in the Third Reich”.

Rosas was awarded the P.E.N. Club Award in the essay category in 2013, the Medal for Science of the Foundation of Science and Technology in 2017, and the Order of Freedom in 2006.

Please register at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. until Thursday, 3 May 2018, 12 a.m. and bring your ID.

Click here to download the invitiation as a PDF file.

In cooperation with: