The Shoah in Lithuania, 1941-1944: German Mass Crimes in War and Occupation

This course offers the opportunity to apply a broad approach for reconstructing and analyzing the Shoah in Lithuania. We will embed the persecution and murder of over 200,000 Jews in Lithuania between 1941 and 1944 into its contemporary context of German warfare and occupational policy.

We will deepen our understanding of the structures, processes and conditions of German Mass Crimes, because we will include in our questioning the murder of Soviet Prisoners of War (about 170,000), of forced evacuees of Soviet territories further East (about 40,000) and other victim groups (about 10,000), which happened at the same time in the same territory.

Looking at the history from several perspectives will enable us to analyze the power relations and choices of the German occupier and the occupied Lithuanians and Jews. With which choices were they confronted? Which choices did they make and what does that mean for our understanding of this murderous history?

Throughout the five sessions we will read and discuss crucial sources and methodological approaches. Integrating historiographical questions—with examples mostly from Germany, Lithuania and Israel—will be useful for our deliberations concerning the relations between history and memory, which lead again and again to heated debates about our dealing with this difficult past.

Dr. Christoph Dieckmann is a historian and taught Modern European History from 2005 until 2014 at Keele University in the United Kingdom. His study Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941-1944 (German Occupation Policy in Lithuania 1941-1944) was published in 2011 and was awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research in 2012. Since 2000, he has also been a member of the Presidential International Commission for the Evaluation of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania.

Until 2017, he conducted a research project called Yiddish Historiography on the Russian Civil War at the Fritz-Bauer-Institut in Frankfurt am Main. Presently, Dieckmann works at the University of Bern on a project focused on sound-history called Sounds of Anti-Jewish Persecution.

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