Before and after the liberation – The East European Jewish experience in concentration and displaced persons camp Buchenwald

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Marion Aptroot; Professorin Dr. Anke Hilbrenner
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 559304182

This research project fills an important lacuna in the research on the Buchenwald concentration camp: For the first time it will place at center stage the perspective of the Jewish prisoners who were transported to Buchenwald during the last year of the war. Sources that were mainly written in Yiddish will enable the project to describe the experiences and agency of these Jews as well as the complex social structures and hierarchies of power in the concentration camp during the final phase of National Socialist rule. Furthermore, the project will show how some of these structures continued beyond the liberation of the camp and influenced the Jewish experiences in the camp for Displaced Persons (DPs) that replaced the concentration camp after the liberation of Germany in 1945. Thus, the project will contribute to the much-needed inclusion of liberation and the post-war period in research on concentrations camps in general. From the summer of 1944 onward, the Nazis deported thousands of Jews from labor and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe to Buchenwald concentration camp. For the first time since the beginning of the war, a majority of prisoners in Buchenwald were Jewish. How could they survive, especially the youths in the so-called Children’s Block 66? How did the different groups of prisoners coexist during this period? The liberation of the concentration camp on April 11, 1945, represents a break, but for many Jewish prisoners this did not mean that their stay in the camp was over. Which problems remained, which disappeared, and which new problems came into existence? How did they describe themselves with regard to gender and generation, to their past and their future? With the help of ego documents, newspapers, and memoirs we will research the life of liberated Jews in the DP camp. The Yiddish diary of Avraham Ahuvia, which straddles these periods is one of the documents we will work with, in order to find out about an often neglected perspective of Eastern European Jewish survivors and their self-construction as "mentsh in Buchenwald".

• DFG Programme: Research Grants