YOUNG PEOPLE remember international

While awareness among young people in Italy and Germany of their countries’ fascist past is declining, young people in Belarus continue to experience repression and dictatorship. The Reflect to Connect project developed a toolkit together with young people from all three countries. Its aim is to strengthen democratic youth education and to share strategies for addressing contemporary forms of authoritarianism. Participants developed practical approaches for democratic youth education and tested methods that combine critical reflection with somatic awareness. The toolkit is intended for educators, youth workers, and activists.

With the project "Short videos, lasting memories", five memorial sites, museums, and NGOs explored how short videos can be used as an educational tool in memorial site work. The result is a workshop format in which young people create their own short videos, reflect on their visit to the memorial site, and engage in conversation about their experiences. The new guide, “Short Videos, Lasting Memories: Short Videos as a Tool for Educational Remembrance Work,” offers an overview of the framework conditions for using short videos in the context of memorial work. It provides political educators with concepts, schedules, and materials to support youth in producing short videos. "Short videos, lasting memories" is a joint project of democ, the Max Mannheimer Study Center Dachau, the Mauthausen Memorial (Austria), the International Youth Meeting Center Oświęcim (Poland), and the Yad Mordechai Museum (Israel).

How was it possible for mainstream society to render the genocide of the Sinti and Roma virtually invisible? What continuities from the Nazi era remain in the police, judiciary, and administration, and why has there been no consistent prosecution of the perpetrators? The videos of the project “Blogging about the Invisible: Short Videos on the Genocide of Sinti and Roma” commemorate the Nazi crimes against Sinti and Roma and show where the process of coming to terms with the past failed after 1945.

RE:ACTION – a project by Naturfreunde Niedersachsen in cooperation with IYNF and Gian Gio' – began with a simple but effective idea: to explore the past in order to better understand and change the present. Young people from Italy and Germany came together to examine the history of Nazi crimes and reflect on how similar dynamics continue to influence our societies today. It's about remembrance, but also about activism, creativity, and standing up for human rights. The result is a photo campaign, training courses, and a 6-step plan to combat fascism and right-wing populism!

The essays in this volume are devoted to the history of the Shoah and Jewish life in the Baltic states. They are the result of intensive study by students who embarked on a joint research trip to the Baltic states in July 2025 as part of the project “Unknown Past? A Journey to Jewish Life and Holocaust Memorial Sites in the Baltics” organized by the Deutsche Gesellschaft e.V. The publication shows how young people engage with the history of the Shoah, how they link individual and collective memory, and how they develop new forms of dialogue and understanding from this. The essays are available in German and English.

The Meetingpoint Memory Messiaen project brought together young people from Germany, Poland and Ukraine by exploring histories of Nazi forced labour through family stories and biographies. The result is a collection of personal works that link memory, place, and community. The new website presents these diverse and fascinating short films, photos, documents, and audio formats.

How can we remember in the future? The Žanis Lipke Memorial in Riga, in collaboration with experts from the Bergen Belsen Memorial, has broken new ground in memorial work: using immersive technologies, virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality (physical and digital) formats have been developed. In addition to various Holocaust education apps, this includes the VR documentary 'Hanna's Story'. It tells the true story of a Jewish girl who was deported from Berlin to the Riga ghetto. She survived thanks to the courageous efforts of Žanis Lipke, a dockworker who saved numerous Jews and hid them at the risk of his own life.

The visual novel tells the story of Max Mannheimer's life in an interactive way with impressive images. From his studio, we can delve into the chapters of his life via his pictures: his childhood in Nový Jičín in Czechoslovakia, the time of the commencing persecution and deportation by the national socialists, the imprisonment in different concentration camps and his life after the Second World War in Germany. The game was developed and produced by the Max Mannheimer Study Center in Dachau in collaboration with the renowned game studio paintbucket games and illustrator Greta von Richthofen.

The exhibition "Spaces of the Holocaust” is an exhibition that describes the history of Majdanek, Bełżec, and Sobibór – three German Nazi camps that operated in the Lublin District during World War II. As centres of immediate extermination of Jews, they were a vital part of the so-called “Final Solution to the Jewish question.” The exhibition was prepared in English and German and has already been shown in the Netherlands and in Germany at the Bergen Belsen Memorial. In addition, a special educational program based on the exhibition content has been developed and is being implemented in cooperation with local schools and partner institutions.