One Initiative – Many Partners

The #lostwords initiative is supported by many institutions and individuals. In addition to our main cooperation partner, the Bavarian State Archives, other parties involved include academic scholars, committed companies and private individuals, and members of the Münchner Kammerspiele theater ensemble. We would like to introduce you to some of our partners.

Bavarian State Archives

The Arolsen Archives are collaborating closely with the Bavarian State Archives on #lostwords. The aim of this partnership is to link the holdings of the Munich State Archive with the documents preserved in the Arolsen Archives, implementing a modern approach to archival access. Together, we seek to advance research into victims of Nazi executions, involve relatives of victims of Nazi persecution in the culture of remembrance, and raise public awareness of persecution carried out through the medium of the Nazi judiciary.

Go to Munich State Archive

Historian Dr. Alexander Korb

Dr. Alexander Korb is the historical consultant for #lostwords. From 2024 to 2026, he headed the Memorium Nuremberg Trials. Between 2010 and 2024, he was Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of Leicester and directed the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He earned his doctorate at the Humboldt University in Berlin and has published widely on the history of the Holocaust, Eastern Europe, and Germany’s ongoing reckoning with the Nazi past. He is currently working on a book on the history of the Bavarian judiciary from 1919 to 1949.

Read the interview

Journalist Ulrich Trebbin

It was the journalist and author Ulrich Trebbin who got the ball rolling. While carrying out research in the archive, he read a large number of farewell letters the Nazi justice system had never sent to the families of the persons executed. He first talked about the topic in public on Bavarian Radio. #lostwords goes back to his initiative. Trebbin had already found the Munich-Stadelheim guillotine in the storage space of a Munich museum back in 2014, and gone on to write a book about it. (Die unsichtbare Guillotine: Das Fallbeil der Weißen Rose und seine Geschichte). Since 2010, he has been working as a trauma therapist. In his practice, he witnesses how emotional injuries can continue to place a burden on life stories even generations later.

History is over and not over: Yes, it’s been 80 years since Nazi henchmen executed more than 12,000 people, but the victims’ families still exist—and in those families the wounds inflicted by those death sentences. Often the families have never come to terms with those wounds or are not even aware of them because, out of a sense of shame, no one ever talked about the victims. When great-granddaughters and great nephews receive these never-delivered farewell letters from their ancestors, it can help them make contact to the wounds, to understand themselves better, and maybe even to grieve and to heal.
Ulrich Trebbin, journalist and author

Medical student Tim Simon Goldmann

While conducting research in the anatomical collection at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) for his doctoral thesis in medical history, Tim Simon Goldmann came across the remains of a number of people who were executed in Munich-Stadelheim during the Nazi era. He is now working with the Arolsen Archives to locate their families. He hopes to give these human remains a dignified burial in the presence of their loved ones.

Read the interview

Medical student Tim Simon Goldmann in the anatomical collection in Erlangen.

The Münchner Kammerspiele ensemble

Actors from the Münchner Kammerspiele volunteered their time to read selected passages from the farewell letters for us on camera. The result is six deeply moving and compelling videos that provide an artistic approach to the subject.

Watch the videos