Event report: Summer School in Lviv "Soviet and German Nazi Rule in Ukraine"

For the first time after its foundation in 2024, the Mykola Haievoi Center for Modern History (MHZ) held its Summer School in Lviv (Western Ukraine). Roughly half of the participants were German, the other half Ukrainian Ph.D. and Master’s students from various regions of the country. The event took place from June 29 through July 5, 2025, on the new campus of the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU).

Under the direction of prof. Yaroslav Hrytsak, MHZ co-chairman, MHZ research group leader dr. Kai Struve, and historians Oksana Kis and Petro Dolhanov, the participants worked on several topics under the framework of “Soviet and German Nazi Rule in Ukraine - Entanglements and Comparisons”. The English-language presentations span from “German War Economy in Ukraine, 1941-1944” to “Women's creative activities in the Gulag” and “Representation of the Holocaust in Comics of Ukrainian Authors”. Prof. Christoph Mick (University of Warwick) gave a presentation online about "Expectations and Experiences: Transitions of Power in Lviv 1939-1944". Prof. Olena Stiazhkina held a public lecture about "Russian Rule in the Occupied Territories of Donetsk and Luhansk Regions (2014-2022): Violence Unseen". Stiazhkina, originally from Donetsk, is a historian and writer and works at the Institute of History of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kyiv.

Excursions took the participants to places of commemoration: the former Lontsky prison, an important site of Nazi German and Sovietmass terror and murder, the site of a German camp for Soviet prisoners of War on the Lviv Citadel, and the museum “Territory of Terror” on German and Soviet rule in Lviv and Western Ukraine from 1939 until the 1950s close to the former Jewish ghetto during German occupation. Prof. Hrytsak’s summary of the Summer School: "This school gathered young scholars from both Ukraine and Germany who study Soviet and Nazi violence. The location and timing was significant: it was held in Lviv, in the fourth year of the full-scale war, and the German guests had a particular experience when they heard the air raid alarm and spent one night in a shelter room. This war experience helps to understand better the 1930s and 1940s - and vice versa, the knowledge of World War II helps us to see the persistence of historical memory." The air raid alert in Lviv region, though, mostly doesn’t mean that the city itself is hit by missiles or drones. The University and the Summer School were not affected.

More about the Mykola Haievoi Center for Modern History

The MHC is a joint research center of the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) Munich and the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) in Lviv under the direction of prof. Martin Schulze Wessel and prof. Yaroslav Hrytsak. The subject of the research is the rule of the two major criminal regimes of 20th century European history, National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin, using Ukraine as an example, as well as the controversial and entangled memory of their mass crimes. The funding comes from Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for the research project “Europe and Ukraine in the 20th Century - Soviet Rule, German Occupation and Conflicting Memories”. The center is named after an UCU PhD student who was to work at the center and was killed in combat in August 2024, just weeks before it opened.
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