Untold stories of the Holocaust South Russias largest city to be explored at exhibition
A new exhibition organised by the University of Leicester will shed light on the untold wartime events in occupied Russia’s largest Holocaust site, Rostov-on-Don – including the discovery of a previously unknown Nazi prisoner of war camp.
The exhibition - The forgotten victims of Rostov-on-Don: a British-German-Russian exhibition project on Nazi victims in wartime Rostov-on-Don/Russia – organised by Drs Christina Winkler and Alexander Korb is a joint project of the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Leicester’s School of History, the Russian Jewish Congress, Russian Holocaust Centre as well as the German-Russian Museum Berlin.
The project, which is based on the results of Dr Winkler's PhD, focuses on wartime-events in occupied Rostov-on-Don and will highlight aspects that have so far been shed little light on: apart from being Russia's largest Holocaust site, the city exemplifies a crime scene of the Nazi Euthanasia programme.
All patients of Rostov's psychiatric clinic were killed in gas vans shortly after the city's capture in 1942. Furthermore, the story of a so far unknown PoW-camp within the city of Rostov will be presented in the exhibition.
Alarmingly, its inmates were forced to assist in the preparation of the large-scale annihilation of the city's Jewish population.
None of these events have been presented to a greater audience so far and the events are also hardly known in Rostov itself, let alone Germany or the UK.
The interconnectedness of these crimes makes the story of the Holocaust in Rostov unique.
A two-year-project to produce the exhibition will be led by Dr Winkler, with generous funding from the German Foundation ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’. The project is also sponsored by the Russian Jewish Congress and received funding for initial research by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
- Further details of the exhibition will be made available in due course.