Archaeology of Modernity: The Nazi Indoctrination Camp at Wustrau, Brandenburg

In the past decades, archaeology has turned toward research on societies that lie temporally between the industrial age and the present, what can be considered a “late historical  archaeology.” The cultural materials for the study of this branch of archaeology include archival written sources, audio and video sources, and eyewitnesses, all of which are analysed together with the findings of archaeological excavations. Studies of the modern period in archaeology, which includes the industrial age and the era of globalization, document both individual and collective processes. Archaeology of modern times requires an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on the disciplines of art history, history, sociology, anthropology, and even criminology in analysing and interpreting its findings. The present article is the result of a study in the archaeology of modernity, in which the authors investigated a World War II Nazi training camp in Wustrau, located in the German state of Brandenburg, about 70 km northwest of Berlin. The camp was built to “retrain” - or brainwash -non-Russian members of the Red Army such as Ukrainians, Muslim Tatar prisoners as part of a plan to send them into the territories of the Soviet Union as trained Nazi administrators. The archaeological excavation in Wustrau was conducted jointly by members of the Free University of Berlin, Isfahan Art University and the Cultural Heritage and Tourism Research Institute.