5:30 (GMT)
Tatjana Tönsmeyer (Wuppertal)
At the height of the German expansion, approximately 230 million Europeans experienced Nazi occupation. How can the everyday history of Europe be written from the perspective of those living under German rule? Across the continent, people had to interact with the occupiers, adjust to situations they did not chose, cope with hunger and scarcity, try and protect their families from repression, and forge networks of solidarity. For Jewish communities, this was particularly harsh, as they endured both the hardships of occupation and the genocidal persecution of the Holocaust. In addition to presenting key findings from her research, Tatjana Tönsmeyer will reflect on the challenges of writing a pan-European history of everyday life under occupation.