28TH WORKSHOP ON THE HISTORY AND MEMORY OF NAZI CAMPS
AND KILLING SITES
Ravensbrück Memorial
The History and Memory of National Socialist Camps and Killing Sites Workshop invites you to apply to the 28th Workshop on the History and Memory of National Socialist Camps and Killing Sites, which will take place at the Ravensbrück Memorial Museum and across the Berlin-Brandenburg region in Germany, from 8 to 14 June 2026.
The workshop will focus on scale and trajectories as analytical categories for studying the Holocaust, Nazi concentration camps, killing sites, and other National Socialist crimes.
Since 1994, this international workshop—organized by and for emerging scholars, practitioners and Holocaust educators—has provided an interdisciplinary and non-hierarchical forum dedicated to research on National Socialist camps and killing sites. Participants examine a wide range of topics, including persecution, isolation, forced labor, mass murder, and the representation of Nazi violence in various memorial cultures. The workshop fosters a collaborative, supportive, and comparative approach to studying these histories through an array of methodologies and sources.
To ensure a space free from traditional academic hierarchies, the program is open exclusively to applicants who have not handed in their PhD dissertation at the time of application (i.e., PhD candidates, MA students, emerging practitioners and Holocaust educators). Participants may attend the workshop up to three times: as a speaker, participant, and organizer.
Workshop Theme: Scale and Trajectories
National Socialist violence and the Holocaust unfolded across vast geographic landscapes while profoundly shaping the lived experiences of individuals caught within its machinery of persecution. Since the spatial turn in Holocaust studies, scholars have increasingly examined the ways in which Nazi violence was structured—how ghettos, concentration camps, and killing sites functioned not just as hybrid sites of persecution and genocide but as dynamic nodes in a transnational system of terror. This perspective has been further enhanced by the mobilities turn, which emphasizes the movement of people, information, and power across borders, and the microhistorical turn, which
sheds light on the granular, personal dimensions of history and the local dynamics of persecution.
Inspired by these turns, this workshop hopes to continue in this promising direction by analyzing how the crimes of National Socialism were enacted through space and time.
This workshop places scale and trajectories at the center of analysis, asking how scholars can move between different levels of historical inquiry—from the broad, structural mechanisms of Nazi violence and genocide to the individual experiences of displacement, internment, and survival. The violence of National Socialism was both a global event and a deeply personal rupture, affecting entire regions while fundamentally reshaping individual lives. Scale allows us to explore this
tension, shifting between the macro-level organization of Nazi persecution and the micro-level decisions, movements, and struggles of those caught within it.
At the same time, the concept of trajectories challenges static representations of Nazi violence. While concentration camps and ghettos are often imagined as enclosed spaces of confinement, they were in fact deeply entangled with movement and transfer. Victims frequently experienced multiple sites of persecution, undergoing forced relocations from ghettos to transit camps, from labor camps to killing centers, or onto the death marches that marked the Holocaust’s final phase. Meanwhile, flight, resistance, and clandestine survival were also shaped by movement, as refugees and escapees navigated shifting wartime geographies, seeking safety amid rapidly changing political and military conditions.
By foregrounding scale and trajectories, this workshop aims to illuminate both the structural logic of Nazi violence and the deeply personal dimensions of persecution and survival. We encourage methodological approaches that move beyond rigid spatial categories, incorporating insights from geospatial analysis, digital humanities, survivor testimonies, and comparative frameworks. In doing so, we hope to further discussions on the interconnectedness of National Socialist camps and killing sites, the lived experiences of victims and refugees, and the ways in which genocide functioned
across different levels of space and time.
Learn more about the Call for Papers
Deadline for applications:
1st August 2025
28