The recommendation reports, published as part of the Digital Holocaust Memory Project, underpin the objectives of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab. Their findings feed into all of the work that we now do. Foreword Digital games are becoming increasingly significant within Holocaust memory and education as professional memory institutions continue to explore the affordances of integrating digital technologies. The so-called Holocaust gaming taboo (Kansteiner 2017) which has burdened both the mainstream gaming industry and small indie studios seems to show signs of lifting. Scholars have pointed out that major FPS (first-person shooter) franchises such as Wolfenstein and Call of Duty have only teetered on representation of this past, often taking liberty with Nazi themes while placing the Holocaust within the margins or completely eliding the persecution of European Jewry altogether (Hayton 2015; Chapman and Linderoth 2015; Marrison 2020; van dan heede 2023). At the other end of the spectrum, game designers working with small- budget proposals had been “promptly pressured to abandon the project” (Kansteiner 2017, p.111-112) due to the backlash in public discourse, often prompted by professional Holocaust organisations denouncing the very premise of Holocaust games. However, the rising prominence of indie studios such as Paintbucket Games responsible for [...]

The recommendation reports, published as part of the Digital Holocaust Memory Project, underpin the objectives of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab. Their findings feed into all of the work that we now do. Foreword Virtual reality and augmented reality experiences play an increasingly significant role in Holocaust memory and education as professional memory institutions continue to explore the affordances of integrating digital technologies into visitor and user experience. There is a rapidly expanding list of projects experimenting with cinematic virtual reality, photogrammetry, digital mapping, 3D modelling, 360-degree on-location survivor testimony as well as a growing portfolio of augmented and mixed reality mobile and tablet applications. Principally being implemented as spatial technologies, several memorial sites and museums are exploring the possibilities of creating 3D graphic reconstructions of former sites of Nazi persecution in AR/VR such as the digital reconstruction of Falstad Concentration Camp, the Here: Spaces for Memory App at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial Site, the Sobibor AR exhibit, the project Auschwitz VR as well as the 360-degrees-walks at Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial. Going further, some digital initiatives are using VR/AR/MR technologies to zoom in on historical documents, testimonies and artefacts, notable projects include the ARt AR App at the Dachau Memorial [...]

The recommendation reports, published as part of the Digital Holocaust Memory Project, underpin the objectives of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab. Their findings feed into all of the work that we now do. Foreword Holocaust collections are becoming increasingly digitised. Whilst digitisation offers many opportunities, especially in terms of preservation and public access to material evidence of this past, it nevertheless also introduces new challenges for Holocaust heritage. Digital technologies offer the potential for more networked connections between institutions, this is not always easy. There is a lack of consistency in vocabularies used for metadata, national and supranational laws affecting digital dissemination differ across the world, and there is unevenness across the sector in terms of resources (time, technological, and human) that can be dedicated to digitisation projects, and digital literacies and capacities. Despite the public misconception that 'the Nazis left little evidence of their crimes', there are large swathes of historical documents and objects that testify to the violences enacted during the Holocaust. The Arolsen Archives, alone, has more than 50 million reference cards and 30 million documents from concentration and forced labour camps, and files on displaced persons. Beyond contemporary evidence of the Holocaust, there are substantial collections [...]