Topografia per la storia (Italy) present the international conference “The transnational history and memory of World War II crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, and the northern Adriatic”, which will be organized in the University of Regensburg, from the 12 to the 14 of May, 2023.

During the conference, the panelists will deal with the transnational history and memory of marginalized and forgotten sites in Southeastern Europe where genocide and systematic murder took place during the Second World War.

The research literature on the war crimes committed in Southeastern Europe during the Second World War and their (ever-changing) place in collective memory fills entire libraries. Nevertheless, these crimes are hardly anchored in the pan-European memory. This is partly due to the fact that, on the one hand, the political instrumentalization of the history of the Second World War in Southeastern Europe continues to this day—for example, through the simplistic assignment of victim and perpetrator roles along the lines of ethnicity or through historical-political and historical revisionist debates about the number of victims of crimes. However, this is also due to the fact that the crimes committed by the occupying powers in Southeastern Europe and their victims are rarely present in the public culture of remembrance, for example, in today's Federal Republic of Germany or in Italy.

The conference therefore has a twofold objective: on the one hand, it is about counteracting the instrumentalization of history to legitimize ethnic-national arguments in the present day. On the other hand, our goal is to make Southeastern European sites of mass crimes in the Second World War visible as transnational sites embodying the experience of the war and as transnational, European sites of memory. 

We gladly invite you to join the conference live in Regensburg, or to follow the online panels „Forgotten places of World War Two”, on Saturday 13 May, from 09:00 to 11:00; and „Holocaust and genocide memorialisation after the war and nowadays”, on Sunday 14 May, from 9:30 to 11:30, by registering at the link: Transnational History and Memory of World War II | Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft e.V. (sogde.org).

To see the whole program of the conference, please download the document linked on the rights side of this page.

The conference is financed by Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft e.V. and by the European Union through the CERV program, as part of the project „Between memory and oblivion: WWII places of remembrance (BMO)”.