{"id":7113,"date":"2023-03-13T07:05:37","date_gmt":"2023-03-13T06:05:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/c2dh-en\/articles\/the-impact-of-war-experiences-in-europe-the-conscription-of-non-german-men-and-women-into-the-wehrmacht-and-reichsarbeitsdienst-1938-1945\/"},"modified":"2025-03-26T10:08:15","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T09:08:15","slug":"the-impact-of-war-experiences-in-europe-the-conscription-of-non-german-men-and-women-into-the-wehrmacht-and-reichsarbeitsdienst-1938-1945","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/c2dh-en\/articles\/the-impact-of-war-experiences-in-europe-the-conscription-of-non-german-men-and-women-into-the-wehrmacht-and-reichsarbeitsdienst-1938-1945\/","title":{"rendered":"The impact of war experiences in Europe \u2013 The conscription of non-German men and women into the Wehrmacht and Reichsarbeitsdienst (1938-1945)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Report of the international conference held on 26-28 October 2022 at the University of Luxembourg.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This conference was hosted by the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C\u00b2DH) of the University of Luxembourg in connection with the FNR CORE research project \u2018WARLUX – Soldiers and their communities in WWII: The impact and legacy of war experiences in Luxembourg<\/a>\u2019 launched in 2020. It invited scholars to offer substantive new insights into the recruitment of non-Germans in the German armed forces and labour organisations during the Second World War, as well as on the use of biographical sources to study the soldiers\u2019 war experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The conscription of non-German nationals, considered by the Nazis as deutsche Volkszugeh\u00f6rige<\/em> or Deutschst\u00e4mmige<\/em>, violated international law. In politics, society and research, various terms have come into use for the men and women affected by conscription: for example, “Zwangsrekrutierte”\/”Ons Jongen<\/em>” in Luxembourg, “incorpor\u00e9s de force”\/”malgr\u00e9-nous<\/em>” in France and “Zwangssoldaten<\/em>” in Belgium. However, these terms describe the mass of people involved. Initial studies and transnational comparisons (QUADFLIEG (2008); STROH\/QUADFLIEG (2017); MAR\u0160\u00c1LEK\/NEMIN\u00c1\u0158 (2021)[1]<\/sup><\/a> have focused mainly on the top-down perspective. This conference shed light on the affected individuals and their biographies, exploring the tense situations in which they found themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The conference was opened with a keynote of J\u00f6rg Echternkamp<\/strong> (Zentrum f\u00fcr Milit\u00e4rgeschichte und Sozialwissenschaften der Bundeswehr (ZMSBw) \/ Martin-Luther-Universit\u00e4t Halle-Wittenberg) on \u201cHistoricizing Experiences of War: Profits and Pitfalls of Narratological Approaches\u201d. In this presentation he addressed the complexity of researching individual war experiences and the pitfalls and focal points for historians working on these narrative recountings of the past.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\nPANEL 1 – Mechanisms of recruitment and military service<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The next day started with a first panel, moderated by Peter Quadflieg, on the mechanisms of recruitment and military service. Denis Scuto<\/strong> (C\u00b2DH, University of Luxembourg) opened this section with a presentation on the connection between naturalisation and military service in the case of Luxembourg occupied by Nazi Germany. He outlined the complexity of the citizenship question in the western occupied territories, and how this was instrumentalized for recruitment purposes as well as for the \u201c(re-)Germanisation\u201d of the population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nina Janz<\/strong> (C\u00b2DH, University of Luxembourg) continued this panel with a presentation on the topic \u201cBeing a Soldier \u2013 Between individual and soldierly experientality of Luxembourgish recruits in WWII\u201d. In this conceptual and methodological study, she focused on soldiers’ individual experiences by separating the military and the individual level through a comparison of institutional records of the Wehrmacht, on the one hand, and war letters, on the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the final presentation of this panel, we virtually moved to Slovenia where Klemen Kocjancic<\/strong> (Defence Research Centre of the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana) gave insights into the voluntary and forced recruitment of Slovenians for the Waffen-SS, and the post-war treatment of these individuals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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