Concentration Camp Prisoners Research Articles

Нацистские концлагеря: суровая повседневность и стратегии выживания

The article is devoted to the study of psychological aspects of survival in Nazi concentration camps. An analysis of camp everyday life practices, as well as behavioral and psychological strategies of both prisoners and camp management, is presented. Particular attention is focused on the phenomenon of depersonalization, and emotional reactions of people entrapped in extremely harsh life in the camp. As sources for the analyses there were taken the memoirs of famous psychiatrists Viktor Frankl and Bruno Bettelheim, which were based on their personal experiences, psychological observations and insights, since they themselves were prisoners of Nazi concentration camps. The article also refers to the memoirs of R. Hess, which allow us to comprehend the strategies of behavior of camp functionaries and their way of dealing with prisoners and everyday life in the concentration camp.

Pomoc medyczna świadczona Żydom ocalałym z obozów koncentracyjnych tuż po zakończeniu działań wojennych, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem leczenia choroby głodowej

Medical assistance provided to Jewish survivors of concentration camps just after the end of II world war, with particular emphasis on the treatment of hunger disease The work presents the activities of institutions providing medical care to Jewish survivors soon after the end of II world war within the borders of post-war Poland. The health situation of former prisoners of concentration camps and the scope of the assistance provided are described on the basis of accounts and memories of former prisoners and doctors, as well as available studies. An attempt has also been made to outline the activities of institutions entrusted with the task of caring for the health of the survivors, such as: the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population in Poland (TOZ) and the Department for Aid to the Jewish Population. The first results of research on the effects of chronic starvation in concentration camps and attempts to optimize treatment are also described. The need for nutrition and the treatment of infectious diseases came to the fore.

The Struggle against Timelessness: Prisoner Experiences of Time in Nazi Concentration Camps

Abstract This article explores the ways in which timelessness affected prisoners in Nazi concentration camps and how some prisoners attempted to track time. By depriving prisoners of timekeeping methods, the Schutzstaffel (SS) sought to deprive them of a sense of future and therefore hope. Going against the idea that the SS achieved absolute power, however, is the evidence that some prisoners managed to keep track of time, albeit in unconventional ways. This research looks at the material records of timekeeping from the camps, from graffiti writing to recovered personal possessions, in conjunction with survivor testimony to understand exactly how prisoners were able to track time. The ability to keep time was of material and emotional benefit to many prisoners, allowing them to intercept food parcels, avoid beatings, mentally sustain themselves during difficult hours and days, connect through religion, and plan for the future. By opening a window into how prisoners were able to track time, this research contributes to the literature on daily life in the camps and demonstrates the value of integrated studies of prisoner life, showing how prisoner groups communicated and how their communication affected prisoner hierarchies, power, and survival.

Powiedział do mnie: „Liebling”. Queerowa lektura wspomnień obozowych Janusza Karwackiego

As part of a relatively new notion — “queering Holocaust studies” — the article deals with the issue of nonheteronormative forms of sexuality among Polish male former concentration camp prisoners. The analysis of selected excerpts from Mieczysław Karwacki’s book Życie wśród śmierci [lit. Life among death] (1999) is conducted with the use of the queer category as well as scholarly reflection on the topic of wartime sexuality. This strategy shows how crucial transgressive themes (concerning the homo- and heterosexual experiences of the author, touching upon his physicality and masculinity) are for the book, and how the author challenges the constraining, binary division into “female” and “male” topics of concentration camp literature. A queer reading of the book by Karwacki — someone hitherto anonymous, unknown to both readers and researchers — reveals the need to split open the martyrological, heteronormative model of war memoirs and to incorporate this kind of content into concentration-camp discourse in Poland.

Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust. By W. Jake Newsome

Come to San Francisco in June and look up. On the eastern slopes of Twin Peaks, a garish pink triangle towers over the city. The symbol, which National Socialists first used to designate homosexual concentration camp prisoners, is meant to shock. Every year since 1996, activists have claimed an acre of hillside during LGBTQ Pride month to remind onlookers of the persecution that queer people continue to face. The pink triangle is one of the most recognizable symbols of queer politics, surpassed only by the iconic rainbow flag originally designed in 1978. Yet its ubiquity in the United States is also curious, a strange transposition of collective memory from across the Atlantic. That transatlantic exchange is the focus of Pink Triangle Legacies, W. Jake Newsome’s first monograph, which traces the triangle’s evolution from a symbol of persecution to one of liberation. In so doing, it not only delves into the history of postwar LGBTQ activism, but also asks about the specific ways that memory interacts with and even constitutes modern politics. Weaving together archival research, oral histories, and the findings of other scholars, Pink Triangle Legacies is a lovingly written book by a public historian committed to ensuring that this past will not be relegated to the ash heap of history. That is, it is both an analysis of the political uses to which memory of Nazi persecution has been put and one such political use in its own right.

ПРИНУДИТЕЛЬНЫЙ ТРУД УЗНИКОВ ФИНСКИХ КОНЦЕНТРАЦИОННЫХ ЛАГЕРЕЙ

The purpose of the article is to study the organization organization by the Eastern Karelia Military Administration (EKMA) of forced labor of concentration camp prisoners in the occupied territory of Karelia in 19411944. Based on an analysis of available sources, such as protocols of interrogations of concentration camp prisoners, Soviet intelligence reports and reports of the Eastern Karelia Military Administration, various areas of the use of forced labor for the most intensive development of the resources of the occupied territory of the KFSSR were considered. The relevance of the topic is caused by the creation of an interdepartmental working group at the Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic of Karelia to form an evidence base in order to recognize the policy of Finland in the occupied territory of Karelia in 1941–1944 genocide against the non-Finno-Ugric population. It implies the necessity to consider the attitude of the Eastern Karelia Military Administration towards prisoners of concentration camps. The forced labor is one of the most common subjects in the memories of prisoners. In memoirs and historiography, the terror policies of the Finnish authorities and slave labor are divided into two separate topics. In this article, the author argues that the policy of terror served as the sole motivating factor for increasing the efficiency of prisoners in the logging industry, both in relation to non-combatants and prisoners of war alike.

НІМЕЦЬКО-УКРАЇНСЬКА СПІВПРАЦЯ: ДІЯЛЬНІСТЬ ФОНДУ «ПАМ’ЯТЬ, ВІДПОВІДАЛЬНІСТЬ ТА МАЙБУТНЄ»

The article examines the transformation of the activities of the Fund "Memory, Responsibility and Future" (germ. “Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft”) of the Federal Republic of Germany and German-Ukrainian cooperation in the cultural and educational sphere. The experience of interaction between former enemies during the Second World War is considered in relation to extremely painful issues of historical memory in Ukraine and Germany in order to overcome historical traumas. During the Second World War, Ukraine was one of the main regions for the export of Ostarbeiters to Nazi Germany. For a long time, a large proportion of forced laborers were not subject to the German compensation law. Only at the end of the 20th century, the German and international public raised the issue of payments to former forced laborers. In 1998, the Bundestag decided to create a fund to pay compensation with financial participation from German industry. The fund paid one-time compensation primarily to former concentration camp prisoners and deported civilian workers from Central and Eastern Europe. Out of the total amount of compensation of 4.4 billion euros, Ukraine received more than 400 million euros. In 2010, the payments were completed, but the fund continued and expanded its activities. Today, the fund supports the implementation of international projects aimed at strengthening partnership and cooperation between Germany and countries that suffered from the consequences of National Socialism. The fund's annual reports show that Ukraine is the undisputed leader among the partner countries in the implementation of these projects. Such fruitful cooperation became possible thanks to the activities of Ukrainian organizations, unions and funds regarding comprehensive support and assistance from the state and society to the victims of Nazism. The active partners of the German fund "Memory, Responsibility and Future" are the Ukrainian Union of Prisoners-Victims of Nazism and the Ukrainian Cultural Fund. Among the products of this international cooperation are an online archive and an online educational platform that can be effectively used for scientific and educational purposes. Thus, the fund became a kind of expression of the political and moral responsibility of the German state for the damages caused by the National Socialist regime, and a cultural and educational bridge between the former irreconcilable enemies.

Роль коммуникации в процессе выживания узников нацистских концлагерей

The aim of the article is to analyze the communication of prisoners of Nazi concentration camps as one of the factors in the prisoners' struggle for life in extreme conditions. The sources of the research are materials from Russian and foreign archives: the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Russia), the Yad Vashem Archive (Israel), the Security Service Archive (Ukraine), the Holocaust Memorial Archive (USA), the Bundesarchive (Germany), as well as published memoirs and interviews of former prisoners. In particular, the authors analyzed the testimony of former prisoners, criminal cases against the concentration camps' administrative and security personnel convicted in the course of post-war trials. As a result of their research, the authors concluded that language ability and communication played a critical role in the rescue of prisoners. If prisoners spoke several languages, mastered the internal camp jargon, and also managed to build communication with representatives of the camp administration, functionary prisoners and ordinary prisoners, their chances of survival increased significantly. If adaptation to the camp's linguistic realities did not take place, prisoners had practically no opportunity to escape. The authors examine the characteristics that determined the framework of the camp community, among which the main were Nazi ideological attitudes, as well as prisoners' pre-camp experience. They thoroughly analyze German and camp jargon - the languages that, if mastered, determined prisoners' survival. The authors show how German changed due to lexical and semantic neologisms and the role it played in prisoners' subjugation, demonstrate that the camp jargon developed in several directions - the formation of a single lingua franca and the formation of jargon in national groups of prisoners, and also pay particular attention to the role that translators played in the camp life. The authors characterize the basic models of camp communication: “SS man - ordinary prisoner”, “SS man - camp functionary”, “representative of the camp ‘elite' - ordinary prisoner”, “prisoner - prisoner”, “prisoner - civilian worker”, and note the possibility (or impossibility) of prisoners within each of them to be saved. Finally, the authors describe the role of communication in organizing the underground Resistance, in order not only to survive, but also to actively resist the Nazi terror.

Political lessons of the medical aspects of the Holocaust through the prism of the evolution of german medicine

The study of the rejection of the moral principles of medical workers and scientists, their societies and academic institutions in favor of a murderous ideology raises fundamental concerns and global implications for the education and practice of current and future medical workers. The worst-case scenario in medicine raises deeply disturbing but important questions here and now: could the Holocaust, one of the greatest evils ever committed against humanity, happen without the complicity of doctors, their societies and the scientific professional community? How did healers become murderers? Could it happen again? The political component of the perception and translation of the lessons and consequences of the Holocaust reflects the clash of universal values, concepts, ideological collisions, including the relations of power and society, the individual and the state, political institutions and everyday practices of individual citizens, political elites and party groups. The source database includes a wide range of historical evidence, including memoirs of witnesses of the Holocaust era, reviews of psychiatrists who were experts at the Nuremberg trials, as well as data from surveys of contemporaries about the political lessons of the Holocaust. The methodological base included the whole complex of historical, social and political approaches, taking into account the methods of the history of everyday life, law, and political issues. The terminology on the problems of the Holocaust was clarified through the prism of medical experiments during the Second World War of 1939-1945. A critical understanding of the historiographical and source-based traditions of the study of the topic "The Holocaust and medicine" in both domestic and foreign scientific communities has been carried out. Obvious deformations of the interpretation of the Holocaust have been revealed in a number of works by American researchers. The assessments of the outstanding psychiatrist Yevgeny Konstantinovich Krasnushkin, who represented the expert community at the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals in 1945, were introduced into scientific circulation. The involvement of memoirs of Holocaust survivors and witnesses of Nazi crimes makes it possible to reconstruct and retransmit amazing pages of survival in the era of Nazism and totalitarianism. The use of private historical methods details the reliable and valuable evidence of atrocities and bullying of concentration camp prisoners under the fascist regime reflected in memoirs, preserved records of contemporaries. The modern medical community, including students, residents of medical universities, are very attentive and sensitive to the consequences of this practice of Nazi Germany, but only if they get acquainted with the medical aspects of the Holocaust during their studies. It is concluded that the Nazi racial laws were mastered, and quite successfully justified not only by the luminaries of German medicine, but often by ordinary representatives of the medical community, which often turned doctors into accomplices in criminal activities during the reign of Hitler. It is proved that memorializing the historical memory of the Holocaust tragedy, including through the prism of medical experiments on people, can hinder the development of neo-Nazi views, nationalism and extremism, antiSemitism and xenophobia in modern society. The political aspects of studying the problem of the Holocaust in modern Russia are convincingly detailed, which reflects the urgent sociopsychological, everyday, ethno-confessional needs of the development of the population of the Russian Federation, including civil society and public initiatives for the formation of tolerance, respect for human rights and ethnic integrity, and identity.

Новые документы о финской оккупации Олонецкого района Карелии 1941–1944 гг.

The article analyzes newly identified documents detailing the detention of prisoners in Finnish detention facilities created on the territory of the Olonets region of Karelia during the Great Patriotic War. They provide an opportunity of studying regional aspects of the Finnish occupation of Karelia in 1941-44, comparing the data with other materials on the Finnish occupation of the Olonets region. The documents are letters of concentration camp prisoners, written to the archive in late 20th century in order to obtain certificates of their occupancy in the camp. Although the letters should have been stricken off, the archivists of the Olonets Archive have preserved them and carried out their initial analysis. These letters are, in essence, memoirs, and in the case of the Finnish occupation of Karelia, memoirs are often the only source allowing us to study the nature of the occupation regime. For instance, the letters have permitted to identify the exact location of some Finnish camps on the territory of the Olonets region, which remained unclear when working with the People's Commissariat for State Security (NKGB) documents. Some war crimes of the Finnish occupiers were already known, but these documents reveal new crimes of the camp guards, some against children. The letters listing names of deceased relatives are also of great interest, showing the mortality rate in the camps. In addition to confirming their occupancy in the camp, former prisoners recalled the events of the Finnish occupation of Karelia. This material demonstrates what work was performed by prisoners, reveals specific war crimes, and reconstructs everyday life in the detention camps. It is worth noting that modern Russian historiography often raises the issue of the impact of occupation on the psyche of children. The documents presented in the article contribute to the study of this issue. They can be used for studying regional aspects of the Finnish occupation of Karelia, for identifying war crimes, for micro level study of the Finnish occupation, and for indactive study of the occupation regime on the territory of the USSR in the days of the Great Patriotic War.

‘Meine Heimat ist der Wagen’: Negotiation of mobility and settledness in two German post-war musicals

Persecution and expulsion due to Nazi terror and the Second World War led to massive population shifts within Europe. First was the mass exodus from the German Reich, as a result of racist and political persecution. Then, after the end of the war, millions of German refugees and up to 12 million displaced persons – former forced labourers and foreign concentration camp prisoners – had to find new homes or be repatriated. These movements led to the discursive negotiation of wandering, mobility and settledness in German language musical theatre of the 1950s. This article analyses such relations by looking at the musicals Feuerwerk (1950) and Katharina Knie (1957) and focusing on their structures, receptions and evolutions; in both cases, special attention is paid to the dream ballets. Both musicals (at that time referred to as ‘musical comedies’ or ‘musical folk plays’) premiered at Munich’s Gärtnerplatztheater and, as part of their plots, thematize the nomadic life of circus people opposed to a settled existence.

Builders of the Third Reich: The Organisation Todt and Nazi Forced Labour by Charles Dick

Reviewed by: Builders of the Third Reich: The Organisation Todt and Nazi Forced Labour by Charles Dick Thomas Zeller (bio) Builders of the Third Reich: The Organisation Todt and Nazi Forced Labour By Charles Dick. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Pp. 280. One of the biggest, if not the most extensive, builders of infrastructure in twentieth-century Europe was the "Organisation Todt" (OT), the construction arm of Nazi Germany. At its peak, it employed an estimated 1.5 to 2 million European laborers. According to Charles Dick's important book, 185,000 people died while working for the OT. Its laborers constructed roads, railroads, fortifications, and underground factories. The OT plundered resources from Nazi-occupied Europe and set up facilities to extract shale oil and other materials required for the war effort. Given the scale of OT operations, it is remarkable that few scholars have studied this organization. Named after the Third Reich's top engineer, Fritz Todt, the OT grew out of Todt's orchestration of the autobahn network and the Siegfried Line, the defensive line on Germany's Western border. Todt was Hitler's favorite infrastructure builder and amassed growing power in the fields of armament and construction. By 1938, the OT had its name and organizational structure. Due to Germany's wars of aggression, OT expanded rapidly. Its hierarchy resembled the military, with uniforms, ranks, and lines of command. Builders and engineers from private German industries joined its ranks as leaders. After Todt's death in 1942, Albert Speer took over the OT. Dick describes it as a "parastatal organization driving the slave-labor economy to boost the war effort" (p. 33). Before the war, the majority of the OT's workforce was German. During the Nazi conquests, OT workers were predominantly foreigners, and it increasingly used forced labor, including concentration camp inmates. Their managers were German engineers and administrators as well as "racially acceptable" overseers from Western and Northern Europe. Dick aims to illustrate the OT's deep involvement in the massive mobilization of labor performed by camp inmates, Europeans classified as Jews, Slavs, and Southern and Western Europeans. As he argues, the OT was central to the Nazi machinery of exploitation, brutality, and death, not merely a peripheral unit. The author largely succeeds in making his case, even though the book's structure leads to unnecessary repetitions. In Dick's reading, racial hierarchies, with Northern and Western Europeans at the top and Slavs and Jews at the bottom, directly translated into differing degrees of coercion and brutality. OT laborers from France and other Western European countries volunteered for work and were paid, whereas Jewish and other concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war were part of a system of forced labor, exploitation, and high mortality [End Page 529] rates. This differential treatment based on the Nazi regime's racial politics existed for the first two years of the war, but after 1941, gave way to a more exploitative and violent treatment regardless of national and ethnic origin. As they expanded and intensified the war, Nazi leaders gave the highest priority to the search for materials and weapons deemed essential for the war effort. OT laborers built roads and railroads in Norway, constructed an extensive road in Ukraine, ran bauxite and copper mines in Southern Europe, and created underground tunnels for the production of ballistic missiles, to name a few activities. Whether or not in cooperation with the German SS, OT overseers treated workers with increasing brutality and disregard for human life while trying to maintain standards for running their enterprises as efficiently as possible. Building on the work of Michael Thad Allen and Jens-Christian Wagner, Dick emphasizes the compatibility of modern management and the inhumane treatment of forced labor. Professionalism was not a safeguard against cruelty and systematic violence. On the contrary, the quest for "German quality labor" impelled some OT officials to exploit and abuse their laborers even more excessively. Using untapped sources, Dick asserts that the OT's top echelons were highly credentialed engineers and administrators: 41% of the senior staff had a Diplom-Ingenieur degree or equivalent (p. 40). This book is a welcome addition to the slim historiography of an insufficiently researched...

Exploring Life in Concentration Camps through a Visual Analysis of Prisoners’ Diaries

Diaries are private documentations of people’s lives. They contain descriptions of events, thoughts, fears, and desires. While diaries are usually kept in private, published ones, such as the diary of Anne Frank, show that they bear the potential to give personal insight into events and into the emotional impact on their authors. We present a visualization tool that provides insight into the Bergen-Belsen memorial’s diary corpus, which consists of dozens of diaries written by concentration camp prisoners. We designed a calendar view that documents when authors wrote about concentration camp life. Different modes support quantitative and sentiment analyses, and we provide a solution for historians to create thematic concepts that can be used for searching and filtering for specific diary entries. The usage scenarios illustrate the importance of the tool for researchers and memorial visitors as well as for commemorating the Holocaust.

"NS-documentation centers” in Germany as a historical experience of overcoming the past

The article analyzes the activities of the centers of National Socialist documentation in Germany. They introduce the German public to the history of the Nazi regime. They are engaged in preserving the memory of his victims and are conducting research in this area. Leading centers NS-documentation centers are located in Munich, Cologne, Dresden. In addition to the centers, numerous memorials and museums are engaged in preserving historical memory. They contain information about prisoners of concentration camps. Red Army soldiers who were captured by the Germans, about the graves of Soviet citizens in Germany. With the help of photographs, documents and texts, as well as film projections, mass media, the Centers demonstrate how the Nazi state functioned, its policy of isolation and persecution, as well as what measures it used to ensure broad support of the population. Museum expositions and exhibitions tell about selected biographies of criminals, their accomplices and victims, as well as people who resisted the regime, shed light on their motives and opportunities for action. A special place in the educational activities of the modern memorial space in Germany is occupied by Grafeneck Castle, where the center of the forced euthanasia program "T-4", named after "Operation Tiergartenstrasse 4", was located.

КОММЕМОРАЦИЯ ВЕЛИКОЙ ОТЕЧЕСТВЕННОЙ ВОЙНЫ В КАРЕЛИИ: В ПОИСКАХ МЕСТА В «БОЛЬШОЙ» ИСТОРИИ»

The article analyzes commemoration strategies of the Great Patriotic War in Karelia. Regional memory politics is considered as a “two-level game”: within the region, where different mnemonic actors interact with each other during the dominant narrative formation; and externally, where the regional narrative is correlated with federal practices and interpretations. The article analyzes the ways the unique experience of Karelia in battling with a different enemy – the Finns – is perceived in the republic’s public discourse. The empirical basis of the research is as follows: archive materials, republic media publications, and semi-structured interviews with main actors of Karelia's memory politics. The study shows that there is a fragmented memory regime of war in Karelia. The dominant strategy of commemoration is to confirm the heroic discourse highlighting Karelia's contribution to the Victory. The narrative is mainly shared by the veteran and search organizations supported by the regional authorities. The alternative strategy is focusing on the commemoration of the occupational regime imposed on Karelia. The main supporters of this narrative are former prisoners of Finnish concentration camps, the representatives of archives, museums, and the scientific community. However, limitations of symbolic and communicative resources don’t allow them to compete with the dominant strategy of commemoration.

Children’s books on grown-up themes. On J. Boyne’s novels The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Boy at the Top of the Mountain

The essay is concerned with the work of the Irish writer John Boyne, who received international renown upon publication of his two young adult novels: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Boy at the Top of the Mountain. The two books are connected by the same topic — a child and the war — as well as an unconventional view of the fate of the small protagonist who becomes entangled in the big history. Among the characters of Boyne’s novels are children of high-ranking Nazis, prisoners of concentration camps, people inhabiting pre-war Europe, and even the Führer (Hitler) himself. The essay not only comments on the plots of the two novels, which follow the lives of Boyne’s young protagonists, but also suggests that everyone, including children, is responsible for their moral choice: whereas Bruno, the hero of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, remains pure in heart, his counterpart Peter (Pierrot) from The Boy at the Top of the Mountain becomes infected with Nazi ideology. In addition, the essay discusses certain facts of the writer’s biography, mentioning, in particular, that he turned to young adult fiction after a successful career in ‘grown-up’ literature.

El religioso español de Dachau: Ignacio Cruchaga

The article aims to analyze the situation of prisoners in the Nazism concentration camps and specifically in Dachau. Also to make known the figure of Ignacio Cruchaga, in all probability the only Spanish prisoner in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Among studies of deportation in Spain, the deportation of men and women linked to exile after the Civil War has been analyzed. The analysis of the figure of the lasallian religious has gone unnoticed.

ACTIVITIES CARRIED OUT BY THE CAST OF LENINGRAD OPERA AND BALLET THEATER NAMED AFTER S.M. KIROV IN THE FIRST HALF OF 1941

The relevance of the research topic is due to the fact that 80 years ago – on June 22, 1941, the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet people began. In the second half of 1941, millions of Soviet people unexpectedly became defenders of the Fatherland: commanders and political workers of the Red Army, ordinary Red Army soldiers and Red Navy men, partisans and members of the underground, some of them were captured and turned into prisoners of nazi concentration camps. The author focuses on the most interesting episodes from the creative and social life of the world-famous Leningrad State AcademicOpera and Ballet Theater named after S.M. Kirov (GATOB) and its artists. How did they meet the beginning of the war? What happened in the theater in the pre-war months of 1941, as well as in the first hours and days of the war? What was the theater’s repertoire in 1941? In his work, the author primarily uses the materials of a number of issues of the theater newspaper «For the Soviet Art», published in January – September 1941 in Leningrad and stored in our time in the funds of St. Petersburg State Theater Library, for the first time introducing them into scientific circulation. He tells about the details of the theater’s creative activity, which today are of undoubted interest to all amateurs of the Russian culture. It is concluded that the outbreak of the war made significant adjustments to the repertoire of the on-stage performance group, radically changed the entire life of Leningrad State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater. It is particularly emphasized that the last pre-war opera premiere of the great theater on the stage in Leningrad was the performance to the music of the German composer R. Wagner «Lohengrin». In those years, Wagner was considered in Germany one of the symbols of the «Aryan culture» of the Third Reich. Today, the author believes, it can be supposed that staging of the German «Lohengrin» in Soviet Leningrad in June 1941 had a political nature, and the decision to work on the performance was made at the highest state level.

Vandalism in castles, Tentors and the enhanced core of the historical Russian city

The article describes the results of the work of the analytical department of an independent security system. The history of the creation of a criminal community at the state and regional levels is presented. The forms and types of work of the members of the criminal community are described. The article is based on an analysis of documents, anonymous sources, conversations with witnesses, self-reflection, etc. After the Second World War, people who, during the war, committed a number of war crimes against civilians by order of military commanders (redistribution of lands, redistribution of money resources, sexual crimes). This task was set thanks to the establishment of contacts with foreign agents who tortured concentration camp prisoners. The criminals released them on the condition of conducting terrorist actions against the Soviet people after the war (economy, social sphere, world order, etc.).

Manipulated memory. Right-winged media narratives about homosexual prisoners of concentration camps

The article offers a critical interpretation of the chosen online activity of right-wing journalists and Internet users that seem to sympathize with this political option. Selected Tweets and articles are understood as exemplifications of either intentional, unconscious or ignorance-caused manipulations of memory, its object being homosexual prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps. Placing selected Tweets in a broader social, political, as well as historical context, the author shows the discursive exclusion of this group of the Nazi’s “forgotten victims” in the Polish media sphere, (re)producing the negative only image of homosexual prisoners and the tendency to falsely identify camp homosexual violence with camp homosexuality as such.