Documenting Nazi crimes through film: Soviet Union, 1942-1945

The conference will focus on the documentation by Soviet filmmakers of Nazi crimes during the liberation of territories and on the comparison with footage filmed by American and British cameramen. The conference will aim to reveal a large number and diversity of filmed massacre sites identified by the CERCEC. A little-known corpus of Soviet filmed images collected for the project will be contextualized against the knowledge accumulated of the history of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, as well as through the history of still and moving images and the literature on mass violence.

This conference will conclude two years of research seminar organized by the CERCEC team, as a partner of the Visual History of the Holocaust project. The conference will echo recent research on the social and political contexts in which the film-makers, journalists, and members of the Extraordinary State Commission worked. The contributions will aim on a multiplication of the analytic perspectives on the well-known places of massacres (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Babi Yar) but a part of the conference will be devoted to lesser-known places (Donbass, Crimea, Soviet POWs camps in the Reich...), through micro-historical approaches. We will also study the manners of filming, the instructions received, the circulation of the footage between different editions and territories, and also the question of the ethics of sharing Holocaust images.

Organizers: Marie Moutier-Bitan (Post-doctoral Researcher, CERCEC/CNRS), Valérie Pozner (THALIM/CNRS & CERCEC/EHESS), Irina Tcherneva (CNRS, Eur'ORBEM),

Partners : CERCEC/CNRS ; Mémorial de la Shoah ; H2020 research project “Visual History of the Holocaust”


Program: 
Roundtable: Contribution of the Soviet footage to the archives on the Holocaust and Nazi crimes
Panel 1 : Creation of the footage and its authors
Panel 2 : War correspondents: texts, images
Panel 3 : Connections and confrontations
Screening at the Mémorial de la Shoah : À pas aveugles (From here they stood, France, 2021) and discussion with the director Christophe Cognet.
Panel 4: Professional uses of the footage
Panel 5: Investigating social environment
Panel 6 : Historicizing the footage I : Ukraine
Panel 7 : Historicizing the footage II : Auschwitz
Panel 8 : Historicizing the footage III : Categories of victims
 
Link to VHH Project Website and programme https://www.vhh-project.eu/events/documenting-nazi-crimes-through-film-soviet-union-1942-1945/