"We Were Slaves Without Rights": Tour on NS Forced Labor in Göttingen
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Remember, Understand, Take Responsibility: A Tour on Forced Labor from the Soviet Union
The tour of the exhibition On the Trail of European Forced Labor. Southern Lower Saxony 1939–1945 is dedicated to the life stories of Soviet forced laborers on November 1, 2026. Annegrit Berghoff, a staff member of the exhibition, will guide through the historical stations and make visible how people were abducted from the Soviet Union to Southern Lower Saxony, deprived of rights, and forced to work during World War II.
Biographies Against Forgetting
The focus is on the individual life paths of those affected: their childhood and youth, the violent abduction, their arrival in Germany, and everyday life under the conditions of Nazi forced labor. The exhibition connects personal memories with historical documents, photographs, and information about the places where forced labor took place in the region.
European Perspectives on a Nazi Crime
The exhibition categorizes forced labor as a Europe-wide system of domination and exploitation. Partners from Poland, the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany shed light on different experiences and memory perspectives. For those abducted from the Soviet Union, particularly racially driven exclusions and harsh living conditions applied.
Art Observation, Documents, and Eyewitness Interviews
The exhibition atmosphere arises from the interplay of text panels, photographs, objects, maps, and audiovisual eyewitness interviews. The objective presentation offers an intense aesthetic experience: Not spectacular staging, but the closeness to concrete biographies shapes the artistic experience of the historical exhibition. The tour supports focused art observation while also conveying the foundations of cultural education.
Historical Learning in Göttingen
The permanent exhibition documents the extent, significance, and diversity of forced labor in Southern Lower Saxony. It shows that forced labor was present in agriculture, industry, transportation, hospitals, craft businesses, and private households. The tour creates space for context, questions, and a responsible engagement with the history of Nazism.
Conclusion: Encountering History Personally
Visitors can expect a knowledgeable, biography-oriented tour through an important extracurricular learning site of Göttingen's culture of remembrance. Those who wish to understand how NS forced labor operated in Southern Lower Saxony and what effects it had on people from the Soviet Union will experience an intense historical encounter here. The visit invites participants to attentively listen to the voices of those affected and to carry remembrance as a social responsibility.
Official Channels of the Exhibition and History Workshop:
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- Website: https://zwangsarbeit-in-niedersachsen.eu/de/index-de.html
