This article highlights the cross-disciplinary methodological potential of Third World approaches to international law (TWAIL) and microhistory by studying the active and complex exercise of agency by victims in an understudied historical instance of post-war justice, namely, the Singapore ‘Sook Ching’ trial or Nishimura trial. This trial dealt with the arbitrary massacre of Chinese residents by the Japanese military during the Second World War. Using TWAIL and microhistory methods, this article analyses trial transcripts and archival material on the Nishimura trial, with a focus on the trial experiences of witnesses, survivors, and community representatives. By studying the Nishimura trial as mobilization and meaning-making opportunity, this microhistory draws attention to the exercise of social and political agency by the Chinese community under difficult post-war conditions and British colonial rule. Chinese community leaders represented the community as collectively victimized and united in the pursuit of post-war justice. However, a close analysis of trial transcripts reveals tensions within the community and the need for a more complex understanding of victimhood.

The Hydrierwerke Pölitz AG was a synthetic-fuel plant of strategic importance to the Nazi war machine. The surrounding area contained labour camps, factories and other military infrastructure. The area was a target for sustained Allied bombardment causing extensive damage to the plant and nearby towns and villages. After the war, the plant's troubled past faded before interest was revived in the 1990s. Here, with the aid of historical aerial photographs and modern remote-sensing methods, the authors document the physical remains of the site, reconstruct its ‘dark history’ and reflect on the significance of the Hydrierwerke for the discourse on neglected and appropriated Second World War heritage.

Since the sinking of SS Arandora Star 84 years ago, the memory of this tragic wartime incident has been strongly held and developed within the British Italian community, moving through several phases, from oblivion to recognition and commemoration to a more recent growing awareness in a wider mnemonic community of interest. The aim of this special issue is threefold: to raise further the profile of the Arandora Star; to consolidate and secure the uncertain historical foundations of the event; and to advance the historiography by introducing new facts and perspectives and uncovering previously hidden or unknown aspects both of the past and the continuing afterlife. The six articles presented move logically through the history and stages of memory evolution and its manifestation – internment and deportation, the sinking itself, material, cultural and political aspects of the deathscape, oral histories, the multimedia ‘archive’, with finally, an embarkation listing to plug a serious knowledge gap.

On 2 July 1940, the ocean liner SS Arandora Star was torpedoed and sunk by German submarine U-47, with the loss of around 805 lives; over half of these were British-Italian civilian internees. This article approaches the event from the arena of Second World War military history, contextualising the sinking within the early Battle of the Atlantic. In so doing, it shifts the customary focus away from government internment policy and discussions of cultural legacy towards examining British and German naval strategies and realities. Tactical and logistical considerations of the conflict are investigated, the explication of which allows more detailed discussion of the sinking controversies and enables delivery of ‘answers’ to the persistent ‘questions’ of why Arandora Star was sailing unescorted and without Red Cross insignia. The broad perspective offered engages with transgression and culpability, and overall the article seeks to advance Arandora Star scholarship with its distinctive maritime focus.

Knowledge of the Arandora Star is no longer limited to members of the UK's historic Italian community but is shared by a much larger constituency thanks to the greater accessibility of historical documents relating to the sinking of the ship, and to the substantial volume of new creative work inspired by it. This article examines this expansion of historical memory by following two discrete but entangled strands. The first follows the construction of the Arandora Star archive, starting from the author's chance personal encounter with a photograph. The second involves a close reading of Francine Stock's A Foreign Country (1999) and Caterina Soffici's Nessuno può fermarmi (2017), two novels that explore how people outside the historic Italian community recognise their implication in the sinking and its aftermath. Both foreground the intergenerational and transnational transmission of difficult memory and the ways in which the Arandora Star functions as an unstable point of historical knowledge and ethical judgement.

During the Second World War, Germans, Austrians and Italians living in Great Britain were designated as ‘enemy aliens’ and consequently interned. The worsening situation on the continent in May and June 1940 stirred up hysteria that spies and saboteurs could be amongst the Germans and Austrians. Mass arrests started in May 1940, and Italians were soon caught up in the detentions when Mussolini declared war on 10 June, thus filling internment camps to capacity. Canada and Australia agreed to take some of the ‘most dangerous characters’, facilitating the most controversial aspect of internment – deportation – which led to the ultimate tragedy when the SS Arandora Star was torpedoed and sunk on 2 July 1940. Building on previous scholarship that focuses on either German or Italian internment, this article examines both government policy towards and the internee experience of these two groups on an equal footing, thus furthering integration of the Italian narrative within internment historiography.

This paper critically reviews and examines the available data concerning Italians embarked on the SS Arandora Star on 30 June 1940. It encompasses their fate on 2 July when the ship was sunk, their subsequent journeys and the sources used to verify the conclusions. The principal aim is to establish, as far as is possible, the precise number, correct names and other details of those who were embarked on the ship. A fully validated ‘Embarkation Listing’ is published here for the first time.

This article progresses Second World War historiography of ‘enemy alien’ internment, especially of the SS Arandora Star, sunk in 1940 with a high loss of Italian civilian lives. Employing a new paradigm, that of the deathscape, defined as a topography of death and the practices that surround it, this investigation recontextualises Arandora Star remembrance in Scotland. Ambiguous loss, complicated grieving, disenfranchisements in mourning and absences in multiple layers of the deathscape form overarching themes that are explored in parallel to emotional-affective memory. The previously neglected study of individual memorialisation, both private and ‘official’, provides an important primary source in the fragmented materiality of the deathscape, allowing fresh insight on both cultural manifestations and political context. As the material and cultural apex of the deathscape, the Italian Cloister Garden and Arandora Star Memorial in Glasgow, created by Archbishop Mario Conti in 2011, are evaluated through the lenses of leadership, identity and heritage activism.

Within British-Italian history of the Second World War, there are several questions surrounding the sinking of the SS Arandora Star, on 2 July 1940, which still remain problematic. Nevertheless, this tragedy continues to play a prominent role in the heritage and memories of the Anglo-Italian communities in the UK. This article focuses on the experiences and memories of the Arandora Star from the perspective of members of the Italian community in the North-East of England. Oral histories of Italian civilian internees who were embarked onto the ocean liner were collected via qualitative interviews with descendants of victims and survivors. This article contributes to raising awareness of Arandora scholarship by articulating how memories were interpreted retrospectively and transmitted down generations. Informing the debate on the purpose of misremembering in oral history, this article sheds light on the events and their imaginary reconstruction.

‘An archaeology of the Pomeranian Crime of 1939’ is a multidisciplinary scientific project that focuses on collecting the material evidence of the Nazi German mass execution committed in the first months of the Second World War in the Gdańsk Pomerania region in Poland. Since 2023, it has excavated mass graves containing material evidence of crimes against humanity.

In line with recent research that regards the Second World War as a “defining moment” rather than a temporary disruption to the development of consumer societies, this paper explores how consumers were imagined in nonbelligerent Sweden. The main empirical source material consists of business-to-business advertisements from newspaper and magazine publishers aimed at potential advertisers. There, publishers portrayed their readers as suitable consumers, and, given that the division of the press constituted the main infrastructure for reaching different consumer groups, this is interpreted as a key to understanding market segmentation processes. The findings show how geographical, demographic, and psychological factors were considered in optimizing advertising influence and reaching classed and gendered target audiences. Although the segmentation process consolidated during the war, focusing on stable, large consumer groups, the imagined consumer also underwent fundamental changes, combating anxiety and despair through dreams of both future and present patriotic consumption.