The Shoah as a European “Project”

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March 14-16, 2023, German Historical Institute (Paris) and online

International Colloquium “The Shoah as a European “project”? New Perpetrator Research in a Transnational Perspective

To what extent should the Shoah be understood as a European “project”? This is the question that prominent Holocaust scholars such as Mary Fulbrook and Thomas Sandkühler have been asking themselves recently. Since the Nazis came to power, the Germans have been the forerunners and practitioners of the systematic discrimination, exclusion and eventual murder of the Jewish population in Germany. During the war, the German occupiers were undoubtedly the initiators, architects and executors of the extermination of the Jews. But everywhere they found accomplices and partners to implement the ghettoization, deportation and murder of the Jewish population. While there is now substantial work on complicity in various occupied countries, an interpretive framework to describe and explain involvement in the Holocaust as a transnational phenomenon is lacking to date. Although Holocaust research has become more international in recent decades, the instrument of transnational history (i.e. the question of transfer of knowledge and practice, systemic comparison and the search for a cross-cutting interpretive scheme) is not widely used in this important field of research when it comes to studying the complicity of non-German societies. The colloquium aims to contribute to understanding the European dimension of cooperation during the Holocaust on a conceptual, comparative and terminological level, in order to explore the possibilities of exploring this field with the tools of shared or cross-history.

The working languages of the conference are English and French.

Program here

Registration for on-site participation: event@dhi-paris.fr
Registration for online participation:
Zoom link for March 14, 2023
Zoom link for March 15, 2023
Zoom link for the round table on March 15, 2023
Zoom link for March 16, 2023