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03.04.2012

Press conference on the exhibition of the German Research Foundation “Research – Planning – Expulsion: The National Socialists’ General Plan for the East”- Warsaw, 3 April 2012

The press conference was on 3 April at 12:30 at the IPN Educational Center (ul. Marszałkowska 21/25, Warsaw) with the participation of Agnieszka Rudzińska, Deputy President of IPN, Dr. Guido Lammers (DFG), Dr. Christian Schaich (DFG), Prof. Piotr Madajczyk (Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences).

 

 

 

German science in the service of Nazism
The exhibition and conference in Warsaw

The exhibition “Research – Planning – Expulsion: The National Socialists’ General Plan for the East” is shown in Germany since 2006. It presents the involvement of German scientists in the Nazi policy in the occupied East. In April the exhibition will be shown in Poland. First it will be displayed in Warsaw and then in Lublin, Wrocław, Poznań and Gdynia.

The main theme of the exhibition is the General Plan East (Generalplan Ost), the German project created during World War II featuring new ethnic order in Central and Eastern Europe. It provided for a settlement in the course of 25 years of five million Germans in the occupied part of Poland and in the western part of the Soviet Union. Millions of Slavs and Jews living there were to be enslaved, expelled or killed.

The German Research Foundation - Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the institution founded in 1920 as "a Community for rescuing the German science" has its part in creating the plan. DFG, which was subordinate to the Nazi regime, the has allocated a significant part of its budget in financing the General Plan East.

In the late nineties DFG initiated a critical research project on its history. One of its effects is the exhibition “Research – Planning – Expulsion: The National Socialists’ General Plan for the East”. Since 2006 it has been shown in 26 German cities.

Professor Matthias Kleiner, the current President of DFG, during the press conference on 15 March, informing about the arrival of the exhibition to Poland, said that it shows "how close were the relations between science and politics in the Third Reich. It is a warning for present-day scientists" - he emphasised. According to Wojciech Sawicki, Deputy Director of IPN Archives, there is not much knowledge in Poland the entanglement of researchers in the General Plan East. "We will learn something that has not yet been in the scientific literature or moreover in the popular publications" - said Sawicki.

The exhibition will be displayed in the IPN Educational Center (ul. Marszałkowska 21/25, Warsaw) from 2 April to 13 May. Later it will travel to Lublin (30 May - 1 July), Wrocław (6 July– 26 July), Poznań (31 July - 31 August) and Gdynia (5 September - 4 October).

The exhibition is under the auspices of Ewa Kopacz, Marshal of the Polish Sejm and Norbert Lammer, Speaker of the German Bundestag.

The ceremony of the opening will be held on 17 April. Beforehand, on 2-4 April 2012 an international scientific conference “Social engineering in Central Europe in the XX century” will be held in the IPN Education Centre. It is organised by the Institute of National Remembrance, the German Research Foundation, German Historical Institute Warsaw and the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
 


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