Center for Holocaust Studies, Michaela Raggam-Blesch (Web) and NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, Laurien Vastenhout (Web)
Venue: Munich
Time: 17.-19.06.2026
Proposals by: 15.12.2025
Historians have long regarded the persecution of intermarried families as marginal to the history of the Holocaust. Yet ‘mixed’ relationships were neither peripheral nor exempt from persecution — they were central to a regime fundamentally concerned with redefining the boundaries of belonging. For Nazi officials, the “unsolved problem” of ‘mixed couples’ and their children sparked ongoing disputes among policymakers and administrative officials, exposing profound contradictions at the core of National Socialist racial ideology. Across Nazi-controlled Europe and its colonies, the treatment of ‘mixed families’ varied markedly – from the legal ambiguities within the Reich to an almost complete lack of protection in the occupied eastern territories.
This conference seeks to bring together scholars examining the histories of ‘mixed couples’ and their children under Axis rule. We invite proposals that explore the daily lives, administrative categorizations, and moral dilemmas faced by individuals in intimate relationships that crossed perceived racial, ethnic, or religious boundaries. While the study of Jewish/non-Jewish relationships remains central to understanding Nazi persecution, we also encourage contributions on Roma and Sinti, other interethnic or interreligious marriages, and colonial contexts in which intimacy and racial difference were similarly policed or criminalized by the Nazi regime, its allies, and its local collaborators.
Following Saul Friedländer’s call for an integrated history of the Holocaust, the conference seeks to rethink the place of ‘mixed’ couples and their families within Holocaust studies by linking microhistorical perspectives with comparative and transnational approaches.
We particularly encourage proposals engaging with one or more of the following themes:
– Pre-war structures, demographics, and legal frameworks — patterns of intermarriage; civil, religious, and racial legislation; and shifting definitions of belonging and exclusion.
– Agency and survival strategies — trajectories of ‘mixed families,’ highlighting the agency and survival strategies of different family members Continue reading

Forschungsbereich Balkanforschung des Instituts für die Erforschung der Habsburgermonarchie und des Balkanraumes der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (ÖAW)
Mareike Fingergut-Säck und Stefanie Fabian (Otto-von-Guericke-Univ. Magdeburg)
Geschichtsverein und Akademie der Diözese Rottenburg-Stuttgart; Fachbereich Geschichte; Daniela Blum und Johannes Kuber