Attempted identification of unknown dead – Karl Franz. ITS Digital Archive, Wiener Holocaust Library Collections.

As part of the Death Marches: Evidence and Memory exhibition events series, we are pleased to announce a virtual panel of speakers who will discuss the sources and new research methods that have uncovered different aspects of the history of the death marches and the end of the Second World War. What sources do scholars use to recover and narrate this difficult past? Which forms do those narrations take?

Speakers will discuss new digital humanities and mapping methodologies, the use of oral histories and testimonies, and other sources key to uncovering new insight into the end of the Holocaust.

We welcome anyone interested in learning more about the latest scholarship in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies to attend.

About the Panel

Dr Henning Borggräfe, born 1981, is a historian and, since 2017, Head of Research and Education at the Arolsen Archives – International Center on Nazi Persecution. He earned his PhD in History in 2012 from Ruhr-University Bochum. Before he came to Arolsen in 2014, he worked as a Research Associate at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in Essen. He has published on Nationalism, Nazi Germany, the History of Sociology, and Germany’s dealing with the Nazi past, including the books Zwangsarbeiterentschädigung. Vom Streit um “vergessene Opfer” zur Selbstaussöhnung der Deutschen (2014, author), A Paper Monument: The History of the Arolsen Archives (2019, co-editor) and Tracing and Documenting Nazi Victims Past and Present (2020, co-editor).

Dr Simone Gigliotti teaches Holocaust Studies in the Department of History at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is also Deputy Director of the Holocaust Research Institute and affiliated with the Centre for the Geo-Humanities, and the Centre for Oratory and Rhetoric. Her publications include The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity and Witnessing in the Holocaust (2009) and the co-edited collection, The Wiley Companion to the Holocaust (2020). Simone has active interests in spatial histories and narratives of displacement, deportation, and maritime movement during and after the Holocaust. Her collaborative work with Marc Masurovsky and Erik Steiner on death marches focused on the evacuations of women inmates from the Rajsko subcamp at Auschwitz during January 1945 and was published as “From the Camp to the Road: Representing the Evacuations from Auschwitz, January 1945” in the edited collection Geographies of the Holocaust (2014). She further explored constructions of embodied time and sensory witnessing during death marches and deportations in the chapter “A Mobile Holocaust? Rethinking Testimony with Cultural Geography” which was published in the edited collection Hitler’s Geographies (2016).

Ms Yona Kobo is a researcher and Online Exhibitions Co-ordinator in the Digital Department, Communications Division at Yad Vashem. She has curated digital exhibitions such as ‘My Lost Childhood’, ‘The Onset of Mass Murder: The Fate of Jewish Families in 1941’ and ‘The Death March to Volary’. She has also written numerous blogs for Yad Vashem and The Times of Israel.

Dr Alexander von Lunen is Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Huddersfield. He has a degree in computer science and a doctorate in history, both from the Technical University Darmstadt, Germany. Dr von Lunen worked in the software industry in Germany for many years, before joining the University of Portsmouth in 2007, where he became a Research Fellow in the Geography Department, acting as technical lead for the Vision of Britain website. In 2012 he was hired as Research Fellow for a digital humanities project with the Photographic History Research Centre at De Monfort University, Leicester. In 2014 he then worked as Research Associate on a project in Social Media analysis for the Centre for Information Management at Loughborough University. Dr von Lunen is also on the academic advisory board for the University’s Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre.