Studies of Nazi occupation in eastern Europe have identified both a colonialist and a gendered dimension to the German project to subjugate and exploit the occupied territories of the ‘East’. Making ‘German homes’, a task assigned above all to German women, indicated the will to stay and settle the conquered lands. This lecture will explore this drive to seize the homes and property of occupied populations in order to create domestic spaces and homely environments for the conquerors, and the consequences for those subjected to expulsion and displacement. Drawing on private letters and diaries from the time, the lecture will go on to consider examples of how German women involved in the ‘colonizing project’ in Nazi-occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet territories – whether as housewives, nurses, teachers or Nazi functionaries – registered or reflected at the time on the crimes committed against the non-Jewish and Jewish populations and how they reacted to the defeat and collapse of the Nazi ‘New Order’ in eastern Europe.
Elizabeth Harvey is Professor of History of the University of Nottingham. She has published widely on gender history and the history of twentieth-century Germany, particularly the history of National Socialism, the Second World War and the occupation of Poland. Her publications include Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization (2003), which appeared in German as Der Osten braucht Dich! Frauen und nationalsozialistische Germanisierungspolitik (2010); and (co-edited with Johannes Hürter, Maiken Umbach and Andreas Wirsching) Private Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany (2019). Her current research focuses on Nazi policies and practices relating to conscripting and coercing German and non-German women as labour for the German war economy. She is currently on secondment to the Institut für Zeitgeschichte München-Berlin, Abteilung Berlin-Lichterfelde, as project lead for the 16-volume documents series The Persecution and Murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany, 1933-1945 (De Gruyter), the English-language version of the series ‚Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933-1945‘. https://pmj-documents.org
Lecture series in cooperation with the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk
