Documentation and cultural center of german sinti and roma

"The Forgotten Memory." A Collection on the Genocide Against the Sinti und Roma is Created

School reports, demonstration banners and video interviews – such objects bear witness to the persecution and murder of European Sinti and Roma under National Socialism, as well as the systematic denial of civil and human rights in the post-war years. The stories and objects from various regions in Germany and Europe were tracked down in the collection project
"The Forgotten Memory". They can be viewed until August 18 in an exhibition at the Documentation and Cultural Center of German Sinti and Roma in Heidelberg; they can also be found in digital form on a website.

As part of the new Education Agenda project "Bridges of Memories: It was Everywhere - Development of Educational Materials on National Socialist Injustice for Educationally Disadvantaged People", the Buchenwald Memorial has used the European Football Championship as an opportunity to shed light for the first time on the links between European football and the history of the Buchenwald concentration camp: In the specially created blog and an outdoor exhibition, the project reports on persecuted Jewish footballers and club officials, SS footballers as well as prisoners who were able to play football for a short time on the concentration camp's roll call area and thus escape the camp's daily routine for a brief time.
Info: During the European Championship, there will be an opportunity to take part in tours on this topic!

What do you know about places of Jewish life in Germany, Poland and Serbia? Young people from all over Europe researched Jewish biographies from their home countries - Kielce, Belgrade, Berlin and Mannheim - in the Centropa archive and using other historical sources. Under the guidance of local artists, they created graphic novels, interviews, audio recordings, animations, films and many other projects to retell the stories of people who were once their neighbors.
The aim of the transnational cooperation project MemoryLanes by Centropa, berlinHistory, the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow and the Center for Education Policy in Belgrade: Anchoring forgotten places of Jewish life together as new places of remembrance.

The final conference took place in Belgrade in June. Young people aged between 15 and 18 from Germany, Poland and Serbia presented their artistic remembrance projects on Jewish heritage there.

The stories from their hometowns are part of a new app that is soon available in the App Store or Google Play Store and provides a common platform for information about Jewish life in Serbia, Poland and Germany.

#mittendrin from Langenfeld: School project commemorates "euthanasia" killings under National Socialism.
"Using brush and paint to prevent forgetting. Approximately 30 pupils from Cologne paint the names of abused and murdered people on a former helicopter landing used by the psychiatric clinic in Langenfeld in the cold and wet April weather. The picture is intended to commemorate people who were murdered by the euthanasia programs of the National Socialist dictatorship".

Civil society in Slovakia is under pressure: As in many countries, the government uses targeted measures to restrict civil society action. Activists are also subjected to defamation, threats and violence. A conversation about the situation in the country with Sandra Polovková, Director of Post Bellum, a historical-political education organization.

At re:publica24, the EVZ Foundation organized a talk on the opportunities and challenges associated with digital approaches to the culture of remembrance relating to National Socialism. Two experts from Education Agenda projects were also there. Johanna Schüller said about the project "For Real? Virtual Encounter with historical eyewitnesses": "It is an attempt to come as close as possible to this narrative and this emotional closeness." Christian Hubert from "Let's Remember! Remembrance Culture with Games on Site", reported on the challenges that memorial site employees and games developers are discussing together in the context of the project.

"Euthanasia is the answer". This extreme right-wing message was written on a brick that flew through the window of a home for people with disabilities. Özgür Kalkan, head of Lebenshilfe Mönchengladbach, talked in an interview about the increasing number of incidents, the significance and impact of such an act and about new lines that are being crossed: "This is not just an attack on an institution for the disabled or the Lebenshilfe. This is a very clear right-wing extremist attack on our community, on democracy itself".

The "Learning from Files" project of the Verband Deutscher Sinti und Roma - Landesverband Bayern [Association of German Sinti and Roma - Bavarian Regional Association] - and the Chair of Didactics of History at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg is digitizing compensation files relating to Sinti and Roma, evaluating them academically and developing educational materials. We talked to Markus Metz from the Landesverband and Leonard Stöcklein from the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg about the challenges, surprises and findings from their joint work.
Not to be missed! The complete interview and many other reports and stories from our projects can be read from September 10 in the 2nd edition of the magazine of the Education Agenda NS-Injustice.

Mr. Moll, you are working to strengthen trans-European remembrance of the resistance against the National Socialist regime with the "Who is Walter?" project: What results were achieved in the project?

In general, we know little about the history of other European countries, and this also applies to the resistance against National Socialism, even though it happened all across Europe. In Western Europe, we know particularly little about Yugoslavia, where resistance to fascism and German occupation was especially strong. With our international team of researchers, in particular from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Germany and France, our aim was to discover more about the resistance during the Second World War and the memory of it after 1945 in various European countries. Three concrete results emerged from this work: an academic publication, a digital platform and an exhibition at the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Education Agenda project "Let's Remember! Remembrance Culture with Games on Site" is represented with a panel at the gamescom congress! The focus is on questions relating to the digital culture of remembrance, digital communication of National Socialist history and the challenges of implementation for learning and memorial sites. Olaf Zimmermann (German Cultural Council), Dr. Deborah Schnabel (Anne Frank Educational Centre), Christian Huberts (Project Management, Foundation for Digital Games Culture) and Leonore Martin (EVZ Foundation) will be discussing the topic.

A cloak of silence hung over the National Socialist eugenics crimes for a long time, and even today the details of this chapter of German history are known to very few people. With an ensemble of young adults, the theater collective projekt-il from Weimar researches the lives of victims of forced sterilization and National Socialist "euthanasia" and investigates crime scenes and perpetrators to show the relevance of these forgotten stories in the present and render them visible on stage.

In autumn 2024, the EVZ Foundation and the Museum of Forced Labor under National Socialism in Weimar are planning an expert discussion on forced labor as the history of National Socialist crimes in Europe. The focus is on the examination of European remembrance spaces - how can these spaces be created? What developments can be observed in recent years? And which gaps urgently need to be looked at? The event will be part of Education in Motion, the series of events organized by the Education Agenda NS-Injustice.