Former Concentration Camps as Spaces of Action for the Present and Imagined Future: DPs as Memory Activists and the Controversial Case of the Flossenbürg Mausoleum

• In Event: Between Absence and Presence: Negotiating the Commemoration of Nazi Injustice in East and West Germany as well as Poland

Abstract

Survivors of Nazi persecution who decided not to go back to their country of origin were registered as Displaced Persons (DPs) by the Allies. DPs lived mostly in camps in Western Germany and Austria. While waiting for years in the lands of their former persecutors and before leaving the DP Camps for emigration, some of them became energetic memory activists. They were amongst the first to build hundreds of memorials in commemoration of the victims of Nazi persecution. Their situation was marginalized, their memory activism is now almost forgotten.
Whereas more research on Jewish DPs and Jewish commemoration has been done this is not the case for non-Jewish/Christian DPs. While there was cooperation on some projects, often both groups chose to work independently, sometimes against each other.
This paper examines the case of the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Mausoleum, which was built after 1946/47 and developed until the early 1950s. The project was initiated by Polish-Catholic DPs and, remarkably, included not only Germans but also Jews, various groups from Western Europe, as well as Ukrainian and Lithuanian nationalists. It was one of the first concentration camp memorials to be built in Western Germany, although the cooperation was fraught with conflict.
Based on untapped sources from globally dispersed diaspora and family archives, the paper emphasizes DP self-perception and representation. It provides insights into stories that have been largely silenced for a variety of reasons, including the erasure of these sides by German authorities, language barriers, survivors' conflictual past(s), and the politics of memory during the Cold War.

Author

• Sarah Grandke, U of Regensburg (Germany)