The Holocaust was one of the most photographed genocides of the twentieth century. Since 1945, images from the liberation of the camps were used as shaming and shocking instruments of visual denazification. Many decades later, these icons are still used in educational contexts such as school textbooks, exhibitions, and documentaries and are…

The Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum (NASM) remains one of the world's most visited museums precisely because it embodies the "romance of technological progress." From its origins in the US National Museum of the early twentieth century to the opening of its first dedicated building in 1976 and beyond, visitors…

The Bunker "Valentin" in Farge, a suburb of Bremen, is one of the biggest relics of armament projects in the Second World War. Although it was built by up to 10,000 forced laborers under brutal conditions leading to a death toll of up to 1,600, it was primarily remembered as a technological masterpiece. This article describes the history…

In the wake of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Soviet museum curators began to establish a museal depiction of the war. This article analyzes these early beginnings of Soviet war commemoration and the curtailing of its surprising heterogeneity in late Stalinism. Historical research has largely ignored the impact of Soviet…

This article provides an analysis of how military history museums in Germany, Britain, Belgium, Poland, and the United States exhibit and contextualize weapon technologies that were developed in the two world wars. The article focuses on technologies (gas warfare, the atomic bomb, tanks, and the V2 long-range rocket) that are directly connected to…

This article is based on a bibliographical data set of over 2,600 history textbooks from the post-1945 Soviet Union and eleven out of its fifteen successor states, including books on international, national, and regional or local history. Among these, it analyzes the illustrations used in 450 books that cover the period of the Second World War.…

In the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks against the United States, people immediately compared the attack with the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor sixty years prior. In this article, we explore how US and world history textbooks published shortly after Pearl Harbor and 9/11 depicted and contextualized both events. The textbooks…

In this article, we analyze and compare photographic images from some of the most widely circulated Japanese and American high school history textbooks regarding their treatment of the Pacific War. We focus on the visual component of war technology, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the visibility or invisibility of women,…

Comparing narratives of the Soviet occupation in 1940 in current textbooks by two leading Lithuanian publishing houses, I claim that Lithuanian textbooks offer diverging accounts, which mirror to a large extent the opposing mnemonic frames supported by two rival political camps. I also show that the same textbooks tame those differences by…

Given Peenemünde's ambivalent military and technological history, from rocket development during the Nazi period to East German naval and air bases during the Cold War, its musealization was considered both a chance and challenge during the region's deindustrialization in the 1990s. Local residents' support of veteran engineers promoting an…

During the Allied occupation of the Axis countries, education and the revision of educational materials were seen as a means of ensuring future peace in Europe. Most scholarly literature on this topic has focused on the German case or has engaged in a German-Japanese comparison, neglecting the country in which the textbook revision process was…

This article explores a key claim underpinning Russian official memory politics, namely, the notion that Russia's past (and especially the role it played in the Second World War) is the object of a campaign of "historical falsification" aimed at, among other things, undermining Russian sovereignty, especially by distorting young people's…

In the fifteen Russian textbooks of the 1990s examined in this article, the Second World War is subject to three levels of reflection: language, narrative templates, and the representation of contested events. The language used in the textbooks represents an amalgam of Soviet propagandistic clichés and uncritically adopted Western terminology.…

This article examines the textual and visual content of the first postwar primer in socialist Yugoslav Macedonia in order to understand the messages that it contains relating to techniques of militarization. After outlining the historical context in which this primer was developed, with reference to teachers' memories and archival sources, the…

Academic history has begun only relatively recently to study films as historical sources, and thus far it has focused principally on feature films to the exclusion of nonfictional cinema, despite the use of educational films for propaganda as early as the interwar period. This essay examines the extent to which educational films of this period…