Tag: Compensation

It wasn’t until late summer 1945 that the last “Ostarbeiter” left the camp in Neuaubing. Their journey home in many cases became a journey into the unknown. Most of them were initially sent to so-called filtration camps, where they were interrogated by employees of the Soviet security service NKVD. Later on, too, many of them continued to be automatically suspected of having collaborated with the Nazis. They were put under surveillance by the security service and discriminated.

Hanna Hutnyk, Mariya Sadova, Oleksandra Havriš, Hanna Šust‘ and Anna Šapovalova were deported from Yevmynka to Germany when they were between 3 and 17 years old. Once the war was over they were able to return to their village where they intended to resume their former lives, but their time in Germany had a lasting effect. For their entire remaining life-time they were viewed with suspicion. Even though they tried to leave this episode in their past behind them, it was all documented by the security service in their personal files and remained there until well into the 1980s.

Together with Eastern Europe expert Kristina Tolok, Sima Dehgani traveled to Ukraine in 2021 in order to trace the lost time in the lives of these contemporary witnesses. They were supported on site by Liubov Danylenko, expert on the topic of Nazi forced labor, and met members of four generations—the contemporary witnesses themselves, their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren through whom the memories of the former forced laborers have been passed down and kept alive. Objects play a special role in their family histories, since they preserve experiences that were not spoken about in material form. Often it is photos of family members that embody their absence while providing a connection to the deceased. Preserved objects from Germany are not only of symbolic value, however, but also serve as evidence of suffering of forced labor and are used to support demands for compensation. Dehgani’s photo series conveys the idea that memory can be preserved in a variety of forms and shows how objects can reactivate history. Her work illustrates that collective remembrance is triggered by specific things and places and is embedded in social contexts.

How is history interpreted and by whom? And whose interests are associated with such interpretations? In his multi-part work “Mind the Memory Gap” Franz Wanner contrasts two places—Neuaubing and Ottobrunn—both connected with the history of the Nazi armaments industry. While at one of them the Nazi past has long since been forgotten and a memorial site has now been made possible, at the other this past is being suppressed.

In the film “From Camp to Campus” Wanner addresses the history of the Nazis’ former aviation research institute in Ottobrunn. The Reich Ministry of Aviation commissioned the aircraft manufacturer Messerschmidt AG, founded in 1938, to construct a building for the institute. Hundreds of forced laborers were deployed for this purpose.1 Today the site is home to the Ludwig-Bölkow-Campus, a technology center housing research institutes and industrial concerns.

The aviation and armaments company Airbus also has its headquarters on this site. Airbus took over the military aviation and space technology of the former aircraft manufacturer Dornier-Werke in 2004. During the Nazi era Dornier-Werke also had a site in Neuaubing, not far from the Reichsbahn labor camp.

In the film “Mind the Memory Gap” Wanner stages a fictitious guided tour in which history is employed as a marketing strategy. Attention is focused on certain aspects while others are omitted. He thus reveals the techniques and constructs behind perceived reality.

Here the past is interpreted for commercial purposes, turning remembrance into symbolic capital and at the same time de-politicizing it. Alongside the two films and his texts Wanner uses an interactive tool to reflect on the role of language as a medium with which to generate ideas of reality.

[1] See Elsbeth Bösl, Nicole Kramer, Stephanie Linsinger, “Die vielen Gesichter der Zwangsarbeit. Merkmale des ,Ausländereinsatzes’ im Landkreis München,” in Heusler/Spoerer/Trischler (eds.), Rüstung, Kriegswirtschaft und Zwangsarbeit im „Dritten Reich”, Oldenbourg 2010, pp. 149–162, here p. 156.

With the fall of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in July 1943 the so-called Pact of Steel between fascist Italy and Nazi Germany came to an end. The Kingdom of Italy concluded a ceasefire with the Allies on September 8, 1943, and declared war on Germany. That day the Italian soldiers who had previously been fighting on the side of the Germans suddenly became enemies of the Nazi regime. Those who were in areas controlled by Germany were taken prisoner. If they refused to go on fighting on the side of Nazi Germany they became prisoners of war and were brutally exploited as forced laborers.

After their liberation they returned to an entirely different Italy. Their ambivalent story was difficult to integrate in the Italian postwar narrative. Many of them felt deeply isolated and from then on never spoke about their experiences again. Very few of these contemporary witnesses are still alive; for their families, the time their fathers spent in Germany has left a large hole in their lives. The reportage asks what the role of historic experiences is in family and transnational collective memory.