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This panel “Moving the Dead. Soil as Public Space for Political Struggles over the Re- Interpretation of WWII in Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia” discusses the power relations between historiography, archeology, state driven memory politics, and civic responses to them. In the 21st century the soil containing human remains of those murdered in Central- and Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1945 saw a new phase of excavations, documentation and reburial. In the context of the ongoing Russian war of aggression against Ukraine we observe a further securitization of memory. In the context of hybrid warfare, the production of archeological evidence is used as a political resource in newly emerging memory wars. However, the strategy is not new: documentation of pits, bones and personal objects has fueled propaganda already during WWII. The authenticity, materiality and quantity of corpses was used as empirical reference for “establishing the truth” by state commissions by Germany and the Soviet Union.

After Law and Justice came to power in Poland in 2015, the Institute of National Remembrance has made great efforts to use DNA samples to attribute anonymous burial sites to specific members of the Homeland Army. In Belarus and Russia a new wave of excavations has been underway since 2021, providing physical evidence for a new interpretation of German atrocities against the civilian population as genocide. The killing sites of more than 22.000 Polish officers murdered by the NKVD in 1940 continue to be subject of fierce debate about the relationship between German and Soviet crimes. These cases have in common that state representatives take action to use the soil as a public resonating space for their updated mnemonic politics. These are part of ideological struggles to reinterpret WWII and its long-term consequences in changing political and social contexts. Many of these activities raise concerns among civic actors in the field of memory activism or neighboring societies.

Oxana Gourinovitch (Zürich): Bones, Blood and Soil. German Colonial Archeology and Spatial Planning in Eastern Europe during WWII

Archeological excavations were part of the national-socialist colonial project of Großdeutschland adopted in the occupied Soviet Union. They emerged from the “Generalplan Ost”, which drew on the expertise from fields as diverse as agronomy, road construction, water management, archeology and prehistory. The paper shows how archeology was adopted on the occupied territories of the Belarusian Socialist Soviet Republic in the “Reichskommissariat Ost” as part of the violent occupation regime. The search for traces of a great Germanic past was a symbolical act and a project of physical ground control.

Anna Izabella Zalewska (Łódź): Transcending the Modes of Control over the Material Consequences of Mass Violence on the Territories of Russia and Ukraine through Digital Data and Remote Sensing

This paper analyses the asymmetrical power relations between state strategies to abuse material memory and the attempts of the descendants of the victims to express their grief. It frames them as long-term consequences of extreme violence conducted during WWII and provides digital evidence of attempts to erase traces of mass murder conducted by Soviet secret police units since spring 1940. More than eight decades after the Katyń massacres Russia still strives to control over the mass graves. The paper discusses methods as remote sensing, which allow to transcend the war related limitations of access to the contested soil.

Gundula Pohl (Hagen): Excavations as a Practice of Symbolic Violence. Appropriating Sites of the Holocaust by Bullets in the Republic of Belarus

The power dynamics in the public struggle over a new interpretation of German atrocities conducted in Belarus circulate around the ideological core of authoritarian rule in the 21st century. Following the protests in 2020 and the popular accusation of being an authoritarian regime on the path to totalitarian dictatorship, the state introduced a new mnemonic doctrine: the Genocide of the Belarusian people. This narrative includes all victims of German occupation on the territory of Belarus – including Jews – as members of the Belarusian people. It is used to justify symbolical violence against civil society. In order to provide evidence, the Prosecutor General's Office actively exhumes historical graves to substantiate the genocide narrative.