February 4, 2020 Facebook Twitter LinkedIn

Nicolas Virtue, Lecturer in King’s Department of History attended the 2020 Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar: Between Enemy Combatant and Racial ‘Other’: Nazi Persecution of Soviet POWs. The seminar was held at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C. on January 6-10, 2020.

The seminar focused on Nazi persecution of Soviet prisoners of war during the Second World War, where at least 3.3 million POWs perished, most due to willful starvation. It was led by two of the foremost experts on the Third Reich’s war on the Eastern Front: Ed Westermann (Texas A&M University) and Jeff Rutherford (Xavier University, Cincinnati).

Approximately 20 participants, educators based out of different colleges, universities, or museums, and coming from different disciplines, from all over North America, attended the seminar, which aimed to spread awareness and understanding which could be integrated into the participants’ own courses on the world wars and the Holocaust. The ideological and structural contexts behind the Nazi mistreatment of Soviet POWs, the experiences of perpetrators and victims, the responses of bystanders, the treatment of liberated POWs by Stalin’s regime, and the historical memory and legacies of these experiences were discussed.

Virtue has already devoted significant attention to the Nazi-Soviet war and to war crimes in his courses on ‘The Totalitarian Age’ (History 1404E) and ‘The World Wars’ (History 2179) but, following his involvement at the seminar, the POW experience will play a more central role in his teaching and design of his courses. This term, he will incorporate the many primary source documents made available by Ed Westermann and Jeff Rutherford (some translated directly from German) and the photographic and film material drawn from the USHMM collections.

“Working with these types of sources tends to be the most revealing and impactful for students as they try to grapple with how and why the extreme violence committed by Nazi, fascist, and totalitarian regimes was possible,” says Virtue.

For more information on the Seminar, please visit https://www.ushmm.org/research/opportunities-for-academics/conferences-and-workshops/between-enemy-combatant-and-racial-other-nazi-persecution-of-soviet-pows

For more information on History courses offered at King’s, please visit https://www.kings.uwo.ca/academics/history/history-course-offerings/

Photo credit: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum