nAt the conference, Shneer also plans to discuss the 1940 Katyn Forest massacre in Russia, in which

"Sometimes seeing is believing, and sometimes almo rent a car seeing is not believing," David Shneer, a history professor and director of Jewish studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said in a recent phone interview.
In his keynote address, "Is Seeing Believing: Soviet Photography, Extermination Camps and the Tension between Sight and Science" at Millersville almo rent a car University's 32nd annual Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide Shneer will discuss the 2003-09 research that led to his 2010 book, "Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War and the Holocaust."
The book details the work of an elite group of Soviet Jewish photojournalists who documented Nazi atrocities years before Western journalists covered the liberation of death camps such as Dachau and Buchenwald.
Shneer's book contains dozens of images captured by these photographers before, during and after World War II, including graphic ones of the bodies of some of the thousands of Jews killed by the Nazis in the Russian city of Kerch. The city was occupied by the Germans, then liberated by the Soviet army in the final months of 1941.
"There's a difference almo rent a car between photojournalism and documentary photography," Shneer noted. These photojournalists "very clearly had a list of instructions from their editor: Go photograph material that would be useful for the press." What's useful "for any press during wartime is to mobilize the population, if you want to keep fighting a horrible war."
nAt the MU conference, Shneer will also talk about scientific approaches to determining exactly what happened at sites such as Sobibor, a Nazi extermination camp in Poland that was closed following a prisoner uprising in 1943, buried with earth, and planted over with young trees.
"In 2008, a team of archaeological researchers started to try and see if they could use archeological techniques to re-situate what happened" in what is now a forest, Shneer said. That's what got him interested in "this question of what we think we see. They were taking pictures above the ground to try to match what happened almo rent a car below the ground. ... How do you find evidence of a crime that took place there 60 years ago? It's essentially a forensic exercise."
The Soviets at Sobibor "saw it as a place where Germans committed war crimes, and their goal was to document those war crimes. So, they took photographs, and they dug holes and they exhumed bodies, and they had scientists, and they had photographers and other kinds of researchers there," Shneer said.
Shneer noted that, while Soviet photographers were documenting almo rent a car Nazi atrocities, "the Soviet secret police were also conducting their own mass shootings of people and digging their own graves throughout the Soviet countryside."
almo rent a car nAt the conference, Shneer also plans to discuss the 1940 Katyn Forest massacre in Russia, in which the Soviet secret police killed thousands of Polish citizens in the forest and then buried the evidence.
The invading German army "discovered this place buried in the forest in early '43," Shneer said, "and they started circulating their photographs. 'Look, look what the Soviets did. We have evidence'. And, I'm telling you, those photographs almo rent a car look just like the Kerch photographs.
"Who's to say who did what? Who's to say that this photograph proves 'A' person's story versus 'B' person's story? So this is where some of the questions about science can come in, as well the tension between science and sight," Shneer said.
"Science is based on imagination, so, ultimately, I don't think there is a huge difference between sight and science," Shneer said. "It's all about interpretation, which means more opinions more pictures, more 'I saw this' is what we need. But everything is about interpretation."
Shneer will deliver his keynote address at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 19, in the Lehr Room of Bolger Conference Center in MU's Gordinier Hall. For more information on the April 17-20 free, public almo rent a car sessions, visit millersville.edu/holocon .