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NGHM-Studierende präsentieren ihre Forschung | Holocaust und Besatzung in Belarus und Griechenland..
On 30 and 31 January 2026, the University of Osnabrück will host the concluding conference of two courses in which students analysed primary sources on the history of the Holocaust during the winter semester 2025/26. The conference brings research on crime scenes in Belarus and Greece into comparative dialogue.
In the winter semester 2025/26, two seminars at the History Department of the University of Osnabrück in the section “Contemporary History and Historical Migration Research” (Prof. Dr. Christoph Rass) conducted source-based research on the history of the Holocaust. Students will now present their results at a joint concluding conference that brings together both courses in a comparative approach.
International Scholars in NGHM Teaching
Dr. Aliaksandr Dalhouski is deputy director of the History Workshop “Leonid Lewin” Minsk, where he heads the witness archive. He studied history and German as a foreign language in Minsk as well as political science and economic and social history in Aachen, and received his doctorate from the University of Gießen in 2012. From 2014 to 2017, he was a researcher in the project “Extermination Site Maly Trostenets. History and Memory”, which prepared a German-Belarusian travelling exhibition. This exhibition was also shown in Osnabrück in 2019/20. For years, Dalhouski has combined his work in Minsk with teaching assignments at the University of Osnabrück and has collaborated with Prof. Rass on numerous projects on the history of the Holocaust in Belarus, including digital exhibitions and DigiWalks within the “Youth Remembers” programme of the Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future (EVZ).
Dr. Dr. Valentin Schneider is a historian and political scientist with two doctoral degrees. As a specialist in the Second World War in Europe, particularly in France and Greece, he has worked since 2019 as a research associate at the National Hellenic Research Foundation in Athens, where he leads the project “Database of German Military and Paramilitary Units in Greece 1941–1944/45 (GODB)”. Previously, he conducted post-doctoral research at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens on the German presence in Attica and completed his doctorate in Caen on relations between the French civilian population and German prisoners of war in Normandy after 1944. He participated in the project “Memories of the Occupation in Greece” at the Free University of Berlin and provides scientific advice to the NGHM team in Osnabrück, including on projects concerning the forced labour of Greek Jews such as the prospection at Karya railway station in 2023.
The History of the Holocaust in the NGHM Teaching Programme
Crime Scenes of the “Final Solution”: Minsk Ghetto and Extermination Site Trostenets
The seminar led by Aliaksandr Dalhouski examines the Holocaust in Belarus, specifically the history of the Minsk Ghetto and the extermination site Trostenets. The course is embedded in a current project: since November 2024, the History Workshop Minsk has been undergoing renovation and modernisation. The historic pre-war building on the site of the former ghetto is scheduled to reopen in spring 2026 with a new exhibition. In this context, students worked with biographies, archival documents and artefacts found during construction work that are to be integrated into the new exhibition spaces.
Maly Trostenets near Minsk ranks among the largest extermination sites in the territory of the occupied Soviet Union. Between 1942 and 1944, German perpetrators and their collaborators murdered tens of thousands of people there: Jews from Minsk and from Central Europe who had been deported to the ghetto, civilians, partisans and resistance fighters.
Occupation and Holocaust in Greece: Primary Sources between History and Memory
Valentin Schneider’s seminar is dedicated to the Holocaust in Greece. Before the Second World War, approximately 72,000 Jews lived in Greece. After the occupation of the country from 1941, the Jewish population was almost completely deported to extermination camps by the occupying powers Germany and Bulgaria between 1943 and 1944, following ghettoisation, forced labour and expropriation. More than 80 per cent of Greece’s pre-war Jewish population was murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka.
Students analysed ego-documents and digitally accessible primary sources, including material from the Federal Archives and the Arolsen Archives, using a microhistorical approach. Central sources came from the digital archive “Memories of the Occupation in Greece” at the Free University of Berlin, which documents witness interviews.
Students Present Their Findings
Friday, 30 January 2026 | Room 02/E05
Saturday, 31 January 2026 | Room 22/104
A Preview: On the History of a Cartridge Case
An example of the students’ source-based work will be provided by Lukas Schupp’s presentation, which analyses a material object as testimony to the Holocaust: a cartridge case found at the execution site Blagowshchina near Minsk during an archaeological excavation in 2017.
The case differs from other historical sources through its particular evidential value. While ego-documents have authors and addressees and thus always convey intentions, such a material object makes a statement about the events that took place there through its mere existence at a specific place and time. The cartridge cases found during the excavations are immediate material traces of the mass shootings that took place in Blagowshchina until 1943, and of the subsequent cover-up efforts by the perpetrators.
The focus of the presentation is the analysis of the markings on the cartridge case, which indicate the Teuto Metallwerke in Osnabrück as the place of manufacture. This subsidiary of Osnabrücker Kupfer- und Drahtwerke AG was founded in 1935 on behalf of the Wehrmacht and produced ammunition for the army, air force and navy at Osnabrück’s Limberg. The cartridges initially bore the marking “P369”, from 1941 the alphabetical code “OXO”. Up to 1,761 people worked there, about a third of them forced labourers and prisoners of war who had to live under conditions of lawlessness, exploitation and violence. In September 2024, a memorial site was opened on the former factory grounds, which had been a British barracks site after the war, commemorating this history.
Lukas Schupp’s analysis thus connects production and extermination history and establishes a concrete connection between Osnabrück and the extermination site near Minsk. In his presentation, Schupp will also commemorate the fate of the approximately 20 Jewish people born in Osnabrück who were deported to the Minsk Ghetto and possibly murdered with one of these bullets. This connection between local armaments production and the Holocaust illustrates how closely the crimes of the Nazi regime were interwoven with German society, its economy and also with the city of Osnabrück.
The conference is public. Interested parties are cordially invited.
Organiser: History Department, Section Contemporary History and Historical Migration Research, University of Osnabrück