What did it mean to live in Europe under German occupation? 
In this episode Anne van Mourik and Thijs Bouwknegt talk with professor Tatjana Tönsmeyer on the new Source Edition Fighting Hunger, Dealing with Shortage. Everyday Life under Occupation in World War II Europe. How did these two volumes come about, and what sources does it cover? And in what way did food shortages affect the lives of ordinary people as well as specific groups such as Jews, Sinti and Roma, and women — and how did they cope with it?

(Image: Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe Marburg, Image Archive)

NIOD Rewind | Episode 17 - Fighting Hunger, Dealing with Shortage in WWII

How to use ego-documents in research on war and violence? In this episode Anne van Mourik speaks with Clara Dijkstra (Cambridge University), and Carlijn Keijzer, Afke Berger and Milan van Lange (NIOD) about this question. The term ego-documents pertains to the realm of the individual, encompassing both the people who create these personal records and the content they document. Besides, as historical sources, ego-documents have a lot to offer beyond the individual’s perspective. This episode delves into a topic central to the NIOD: the intricate connection between ego documents and research, discussing some of the (im)possibilities, pitfalls, and opportunities of using such sources in documenting and studying the history of war.

NIOD Rewind Episode 36 - Between lines and lives: using ego-documents to study war and violence

How do researchers navigate field research in conflict-affected societies? In this episode of NIOD Rewind on War and Violence, we explore the challenges and opportunities of conducting field research. Host Anne van Mourik engages with researchers Solange Fontana and Lauren Gould, both with extensive experience in conflict-impacted societies. Why are first-hand experiences important when researching war and violence? What does the increasing shift to remote warfare mean for scholars seeking to conduct fieldwork? When doing fieldwork, how do you manage security? And how to deal with the emotional toll the work might take?

NIOD Rewind Episode 37 - Navigating field research in conflict-affected societies

Why did a relatively high number of psychiatric patients die in Dutch psychiatric institutions during World War II? Anne van Mourik interviews Eveline Buchheim (NIOD) and Ralf Futselaar (NIOD and Erasmus University Rotterdam) regarding their book, ‘Expelled from Care’ (Uit Zorg Verdreven). In Nazi Germany, psychiatric patients were killed as part of the regime’s ‘euthanasia program’, which aimed to eradicate individuals considered genetically and economically ‘undesirable’. Did this National Socialist ideology also contribute to the excess mortality among the Dutch psychiatric population? What was life like for patients and staff working in psychiatric institutions during the war?

Credits image: Collection Museum van de Geest | Dolhuys, Haarlem

NIOD Rewind Episode 38 - Expelled from Care: the Dutch Mental Health System During World War II

In recent years, several far-right parties espousing nationalist, anti-immigrant, and Eurosceptic ideas have garnered significant support. Despite their nationalist ideologies, these contemporary far-right movements have demonstrated a surprising capacity for international cooperation. Anne van Mourik interviews Martin Hamre, a historian of fascism at the Freie Universität Berlin about this topic. What are some earlier examples of fascist internationalism? How did fascist ideas spread through international conferences and cooperation in the 1930s? What insights does Hamre's research provide for understanding the contemporary European far right?

Photo: Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, LVCE, Wikimedia Commons.

NIOD Rewind Episode 39 - The Paradoxes of Fascist Internationalism

How has American tourism to Nazi concentration camps influenced the ways in which people remember the Holocaust and Nazi atrocities? In this episode, Anne van Mourik (NIOD) sits down with Leonie Werle (Freie Universität Berlin) to explore this question. As early as 1948, American tourists started to visit German concentration camps, with magazines even promoting Germany as the land of ‘Bach and Belsen’. What did this early postwar tourism to the camps look like? Is it a form of dark tourism? Why were the camps often experienced as disappointing by American tourists? And why do people so often compare the Holocaust and concentration camps to present-day events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic or other crises?

Credits image in logo: Visitors view a photomural of corpses piled on the ground in the newly liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the "Lest We Forget" exhibition at the Library of Congress.
Photographer: John Mueller
Date: 1945 June 30

NIOD Rewind Episode 40 - Early Postwar Tourism to Former Concentration Camps

In the first episode of a special NIOD Rewind series called Flash, Anne van Mourik speaks with historian Dr. Anne-Lise Bobeldijk (NIOD) about how president Trump and president Putin are exploiting World War II history to support their current political strategies. In this short 10-minute episode, we explore how the past is being reshaped to influence the present, from Trump’s comments on US-Soviet cooperation to Putin’s manipulation of history to justify his war in Ukraine.

Photo: 2nd Lt. William Robertson and Lt. Alexander Sylvashko, Red Army, shown in front of sign [East Meets West] symbolizing the historic meeting of the Soviet and American Armies, near Torgau, Germany on Elbe Day, the day Soviet and American troops met at the Elbe River (April 1945). Wikimedia Commons.

NIOD Rewind Flash Episode 41 - History at stake: Trump, Putin and the War in Ukraine

Exactly eighty years ago, in the midst of the liberation’s chaos, the NIOD (then the RIOD) was founded with a clear mission: to document Dutch experiences of the Second World War. In this special anniversary episode, Anne van Mourik speaks with Jaap Cohen, Eveline Buchheim, Uğur Üngör, and Arvid de Raaij about eighty years of collecting memories, experiences, and stories. They reflect on NIOD’s urgent beginnings, its expansion to collect information about conflicts such as Indonesia’s War of Independence and the Yugoslav wars, and the ideas and challenges of documenting more recent atrocities, from Syria’s civil war to the Yezidi genocide. Why is collecting testimonies of war and genocide so vital? Why does it still matter just as much today? And how to collect digital sources about war and violence, such as the X-posts on the Ajax-Maccabi riots in Amsterdam in 2024?

Image: Loe de Jong, 1950 (NIOD archive)

NIOD Rewind Episode 42 - 80 Years of Collecting War


In this episode, Anne van Mourik (NIOD) sits down with famine scholars Alex de Waal (Tufts University) and Ingrid de Zwarte (Wageningen University & Research) to discuss how hunger can be used as a political-military instrument of power—from the Dutch Hunger Winter of WWII to Sudan, Yemen, Ukraine, and Gaza today.
 
Was starvation in the Netherlands during WWII intentional? What role did food play in Dutch colonial violence in the Indonesian War of Independence? And in the present: What are Israel’s objectives in starving Palestinians? Why is the international community failing to act—even when famine unfolds in full view of the world?

NIOD Rewind Episode 43 - Hunger as a Weapon of War and Genocide

Did European colonialism truly end in the 20th century, as we often assume? In this episode Anne van Mourik (NIOD) speaks with Martin Thomas (Exeter University) about his book The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization (Princeton University Press). He argues that decolonization was not just the transfer of power from colonizers to the colonized, but a global, often violent process that forged new alliances, reshaped international connections, and left behind enduring colonial legacies. In this episode we ask: How to rethink decolonization? If empires were so powerful, military, politically, economically, why and how did they collapse? And how is colonial violence different than violence in non-imperial spaces?
 
Photo: Civilian are pushing a military jeep. 1 August 1962. Wikimedia Commons.

NIOD Rewind Episode 44 - The End of Empires and a World Remade

In this episode, Anne van Mourik speaks with historian Tatjana Tönsmeyer (University of Wuppertal) and Peter Romijn (NIOD and UvA) about Tönsmeyer’s groundbreaking book Unter deutscher Besatzung: Europa 1939–1945 (Under German occupation: Europe 1939-1945). The book offers a Europe-wide account of life under Nazi occupation told from the perspective of the occupied, exploring fear, deprivation, and everyday strategies of survival. How did a climate of fear affect daily life in occupied Europe? Why is it not useful to talk in terms of ‘collaboration’ and ‘resistance’? And what can the book teach us about how to understand and respond to situations of occupation today?

NIOD Rewind | Episode 17 - Fighting Hunger, Dealing with Shortage in WWII

NIOD Rewind Podcast on War & Violence

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