This event is organised in association with Northamptonshire Rights and Equalities Council.

Our keynote speaker this year is Dr Roland Clark from Liverpool University, who will give a talk based on his research titled: ‘Fascists as Holocaust Perpetrators in Croatia, Romania, Poland and Ukraine’. See below for a full abstract.

Our other speakers include:

Professor Nick Petford, Vice Chancellor of the University of Northampton

John Josephs, from Northampton Hebrew Congregation

Siobhan Hyland, from Northamptonshire Rights and Equalities Council

Ella Phelps, a BA History student at the University of Northampton

Abstract for Dr Clark's talk: Despite the widespread agreement that fascism paved the way for the Holocaust by spreading antisemitic propaganda, promoting violence, and destabilising democracies, historians know remarkably little about the extent to which people who were involved in fascist movements during the 1930s participated in the mass murder of Jews and Roma during the Holocaust. This talk uses three case studies from Eastern Europe to explore the roles fascist activists played in the Holocaust. Supporters of the Ustasha movement began implementing the Holocaust almost immediately when their movement came to power in the Independent State of Croatia, and individual Ustasha members played key roles in local massacres of Serbs throughout the war. In Romania the story was complicated by the fact that the Legion of the Archangel Michael was dissolved five months before the Holocaust began, but tracing the individual biographies for former legionaries shows that many joined the army and were probably involved in the massacres that accompanied the early phase of Operation Barbarossa. In Poland and Ukraine, members of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists were trained as mass murderers by Nazi Einsatzgruppen units and turned their skills against Poles in 1943, massacring entire villages. Looking at local massacres and individual perpetrators gives us a new perspective on both fascism and the Holocaust, showing that they were linked by more than just ideology.