As the Nazis sought to erase evidence of their crimes, victims risked their lives to preserve them. This lecture highlights rare documents from the Ravensbrück Archives and explores their enduring significance for post-war justice and collective memory.
As Allied troops approached Nazi extermination, concentration, and labor camps in 1944 and 1945, the SS attempted to destroy evidence of their crimes, including documents detailing the bureaucratic evidence of the genocide. It is partly thanks to the victims that their goal failed. In the ghettos, camps, exiles, and hiding places during the war, victims risked their lives to paint, draw, photograph, and write about what happened, to access official SS and other documents and smuggle them out of the camps, and to pass on information to underground groups, governments in exile, and international authorities.
Evidence created, collected, and provided by victims played a crucial role in post-war war crimes trials, such as the Nuremberg Trials, and in conveying the unimaginable reality of Nazi persecution and genocide to the outside world.
The collection from the Polish Research Institute in Lund, which is kept at Lund University Library, contains an incredible archive of documentation and material created, collected and preserved thanks to the efforts of Nazi victims who came to Sweden as repatriates in 1945.
In this lecture, Victoria Van Orden Martínez, a doctoral student at the Department of History, Northern European Center for Research on Antisemitism and the Holocaust (NORAH), highlights some of these invaluable materials, which not only contributed to justice after the war but also continue to contribute to the memory and understanding of Nazi atrocities today.
Part of a lecture series
The lecture is part of the University Library's lecture series on the Ravensbrück Archive, which takes place on selected Thursdays in February and March (February 5, February 19, February 26, March 5, March 26).
Everyone is welcome and no advance registration is required. The lecture on February 26th will be held in English.