IHC’s project “Portuguese and Spanish Forced Laborers under National Socialism: History, Memory and Citizenship”, coordinated by Cláudia Ninhos, was approved for funding by the European program “Europe for Citizens – European Remembrance”. Shortly before, in the context of the National Program for the Memory of the Holocaust, the Council of Ministers had already proved the project “Portuguese in the Mauthausen Concentration Camp (1938-1945)”, which aims to deepen the study of the Portuguese who passed by the Mauthausen Concentration Camp.

Together, these two projects constitute a significant stimulus to research in this field, already initiated by the team led by Fernando Rosas, who had identified about a thousand Portuguese victims of the National Socialist regime, initially funded by the German foundation EVZ – Erinnerung, Verantwortung, Zukunft [Memory, Responsibility, Future].

For the new transnational project, the IHC joins several European institutions to broaden the geographic scope of the research and, above all, to promote knowledge about the forced labour of Portuguese and Spanish during the III Reich in society. One of the main objectives of the project is the development of a digital platform with information from the Portuguese and Spanish who were forced workers during that period.

In addition, the project also includes training courses for teachers in Portugal and Spain, as well as the production of teaching material. For this purpose, it will be essential the collaboration of the Association of History Teachers and the German partners of the Arolsen Archives – International Center on Nazi Persecution — whose educational service has developed pedagogical materials on the Holocaust and forced labour based on the documentation they hold from the camps. Finally, the team will also organise an exhibition on this theme, to open in Paris. The other partners of the project are the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​the University of Paris 8 and the EUROM – European Observatory on Memories.

The IHC team includes, in addition to Cláudia Ninhos and Fernando Rosas, Ansgar Schaefer and António Carvalho, associate researcher and director of the National Museum of Archeology.