HERO? TRAITOR? VICTIM? AMBIGUITY OF DATA IN WAR BIOGRAPHIES

Project WARLUX - Soldiers and their Communities in WWII: The Impact and Legacy of War Experiences in Luxembourg", at the Luxembourg Centre for Digital and Contemporary History (C²DH) of the University of Luxembourg researches the personal side of the history of Luxembourgish youth born between 1920 and 1927 who were enrolled into German services under the Nazi occupation of Luxembourg during World War II. The research focuses on personal testimonies and their individual war experience to uncover these men, women, and families' individual experiences. The Methodology includes a biographical app... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Janz, Nina
Dokumenttyp: conferencePoster
Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
Schlagwörter: Biographical data / WWII / Luxembourg / soldier / relational database
Sprache: unknown
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-26746421
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://zenodo.org/record/6602942

Project WARLUX - Soldiers and their Communities in WWII: The Impact and Legacy of War Experiences in Luxembourg", at the Luxembourg Centre for Digital and Contemporary History (C²DH) of the University of Luxembourg researches the personal side of the history of Luxembourgish youth born between 1920 and 1927 who were enrolled into German services under the Nazi occupation of Luxembourg during World War II. The research focuses on personal testimonies and their individual war experience to uncover these men, women, and families' individual experiences. The Methodology includes a biographical approach to offer a micro-historical perspective on single actors to link individual life stories to home communities. WARLUX will analyse the individuals from their social environments, social background, or trajectories during the war and their life in the post-war period based on their biographies. But this is almost where the most significant challenge lies in avoiding pre-existing terminologies, e.g. Nazi terms. When analysing the dataset of contemporary Nazi documents and post-war documents, the sources describe the same objects and elements but require a different interpretation. When building a dataset for independent and objective research, it is crucial to distinguish between the various sources and make the data entries comprehensible. While for the Nazis, volunteers in the Waffen-SS were "exemplary fighters", in post-war Luxembourg, they were "traitors to the fatherland". The young men who deserted from the Wehrmacht during the war, "cowards" and "Wehrkraftzersetzer" for the Nazis, in peacetime "heroes" of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The project has worked with a relational database (nodegoat) so far but is reaching its limits. This database's strength lies in linking objects while assigning strict categories and dates but fails when it comes to flexible and uncertain or ambiguous data. In many sources, there are different variations of dates and circumstances of the targets under study. For example, the Nazi ...