Viktoria Soloschenko, Doktorin für Zeitgeschichte am Institut für Weltgeschichte der Nationalen Akademie der Wissenschaften der Ukraine. 2005 Promotion an der Universität für Slawistik Kiew zum Thema «Ukrainisch-deutsche Beziehungen in den 90 Jahren des 20. Jh.». Seit September 2005 - 2007 Dozentin (Lehrstuhl für Geschichte, Universität für Slawistik Kiew).  2009-2012 Lehrstuhlleiterin.

2012 bis 2018 wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin (Dozentin) und wissenschaftliche Sekretärin des Institutes für Weltgeschichte der Nationalen Akademie der Wissenschaften der Ukraine (Kiew), seit November 2018 und heutzutage Stellvertretende Direktorin des Instituts für Weltgeschichte der Nationalen Akademie der Wissenschaften der Ukraine.

Forschungsfelder: NS Kunstraub, Raubkunst, Restitution, Holocaust in der Ukraine, ukrainisch-deutsche kulturelle Beziehungen Mitte des 20. Anfang des 21. Jahrhunderts. Ihre aktuellen Forschungen konzentrieren sich auf der NS Raubkunst mit besonderem Schwerpunkt «Holocaust der ukrainischen Juden und Spuren ihrer konfiszierten Kulturgüter».

Andrii Kudriachenko, Professor für Zeitgeschichte am Institut für Weltgeschichte der Nationalen Akademie der Wissenschaften der Ukraine. 1987 Promotion an der Fakultät für die Geschichte der Taras Schewtschenko Universität, Kiew. 1995 Habilitation in der Zeitgeschichte zum Thema “Europäische Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1970 - 1991)“.

1995-1998 wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter des Instituts für Weltwirtschaft und Internationalen Beziehungen der Nationalen Akademie der Wissenschaften der Ukrainе. 1998-2000 Experte bei der Präsidentenverwaltung der Ukraine, Ministerium des auswärtigen Amtes der Ukraine. 1998-2000  Diplomat,  Gesandter der Botschaft der Ukraine in Deutschland (in Bonn, in Berlin). Seit September 2000-2008 Abteilungsleiter im Nationalen Institut für strategische Forschung, Lehrer  in der Universität Kiew, Diplomatische Akademie der Ukraine.

Seit November 2008 Direktor des Instituts für Europäische Studien der Nationalen Akademie der Wissenschaften der Ukraine, daraus entstand im Jahre 2012 eine staatliche Institution „Institut für Weltgeschichte der Nationalen Akademie der Wissenschaften der Ukraine.“ Seit 2012 bis heute, Direktor des „Instituts für Weltgeschichte der Nationalen Akademie der Wissenschaften der Ukraine.“ 2018 korrespondierendes Mitglied der Nationalen Akademie der Wissenschaften der Ukraine. Vorsitzender  der  Zeitschriftsredaktionen  „Probleme  der Weltgeschichte“,  Mitglied        von mehreren Redaktionen der wissenschaftlichen Zeitschriften in der Ukraine und im Ausland. Forschungsfelder: Holocaust, Hungersnot in der Ukraine, ukrainisch-deutsche Beziehungen Mitte 20. – Anfang 21. Jh., das historische Gedächtnis der Ukrainer.

Kamil Kijek is a Assistant Professor at the Jewish Studies Department, University of Wrocław, Poland.  He has been a Prins Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Jewish History in New York and Sosland Family Fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. During his doctoral studies he held various fellowships in Israel, Germany and United Kingdom. His research interest include Central-East European Jewish History in the end of XIX and in XX century, social and cultural theory.  

"The Last Polish Shtetl? Jewish Community of Dzierżoniów, Jewish World, the Cold War and Communism (1945-1950)"

The goal of the research project is to analyze, describe and explain the main phenomena that characterized the first 5 years of the post-Holocaust Jewish community in Poland through a microanalysis of the Jewish community of one particular Lower Silesian town, thereby shedding new light on three major fields of history: Polish, Jewish and the Cold War. This study is devoted to the town of Dzierżoniów (formerly German Reichenbach) in Lower Silesia, a region that was annexed by the Polish state following the Second World War and the Potsdam Peace conference in July-August 1945. In July 1946, Dzierżoniów held approximately 11,000 Jewish inhabitants, who comprised almost 50% of the town's population. Until 1950 this proportion had never dropped below 20% making Dzierżoniów a unique place on the map of post-Holocaust Europe, branded by some observers at the time as “the last Polish shtetl”.

Through perspective of microhistorical study on one particular community, this project aims to throw a new light and provide new explanations of large historical processes: The character of the the Polish Jewish community after the Holocaust, construction and demise of so called Jewish autonomy in post-Holocaust Poland in the years 1945-1950, dynamics of the relations between new centers of the Jewish world (USA, Palestine/Israel) and the former Polish center, Cold War evolution of transnational Jewish politics, changes in Jewish social structure, expulsion of the German population and the polonization of Lower Silesia, and finally, the dynamics and character of Jewish attitudes towards the new political system being installed in Poland.

Marta Havryshko is a historian of women’s and gender history of the Second World War and the Holocaust. She is a Research Associate at the I. Krypiakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Member of the international research group “Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict.” 

As a Senior Fellow at the Center for Holocaust Studies, she conducts research for her project “War, Gender, and Power: Sexual Violence during the Holocaust in Ukraine”, which examine the typology, dynamics, and nature of sexual violence perpetrated against Jewish women and men by different actors – Germans and their helpers. The project dedicates special attention to the sexually aggressive behavior of the local perpetrators, including members of civic administration, Ukrainian auxiliary police, different partisan groups, and “ordinary people.” It explores how cultural ideas about the body, sexuality, reproduction, ethnic, racial, national, religious, political identity, combatant status, and power position contributed to sexual violence perpetration. The project also considers how ideas and discourses of femininity/masculinity and gender roles contributed to perpetrators’ motivations and strategies for sexual violence and victims’/survivors’ experiences of these processes.

Marilyn Campeau is a historian of the Second World War and the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Her doctoral research studies the daily life of Red Army artist-combatants through an examination of the drawings they created on the frontlines between 1941 and 1945. As a Senior Fellow at the Center for Holocaust Studies, she conducts research for her project “Facing Europe: Soviet Soldiers in Germany, 1945–1994,” which follows Soviet troops as they traveled and occupied Central Europe during the postwar period. This book project investigates the interactions and power dynamics Red Army soldiers developed with Holocaust survivors and refugees, German citizens, as well as with representatives of the various Allied armed forces that occupied Germany from May 1945 onward.

Judith Vöcker is a PhD student at the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies of the University of Leicester. Her dissertation aims to provide a first comprehensive overview of the German jurisdiction in the General Government and how the Nazi regime instrumentalised it as a political tool in their occupied space. In doing so, she will deliver answers about how Nazi ideologies and racial premises manifested themselves in their legal sphere, how German law was applied and amended over the time of occupation, and how German judges applied the plethora of new regulations in court proceedings and verdicts in the General Government.

At the Institute for Contemporary History, Judith will extensively work with the extensive collection of post-war proceedings initiated against crimes committed by German juridical entities from 1939 until 1945. These sources shed light on the continuities of German lawyers in the General Government and allow to investigate, which legal traditions they followed or if any room for manoeuvre existed within their criminal investigations and verdicts.

Prior to commencing her doctorate, Judith received a Bachelor of Arts in Slavic Studies and German literature and linguistics from the University of Cologne, the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, and the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow; and a Master of Arts in Eastern European History from the European University Viadrina and University College London. Her doctorate has been funded, amongst others, by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom, the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, and the German History Society. Prior to her Fellowship at the IfZ, Judith was a Junior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies.

Jonathan Huener is Professor of History at the University of Vermont. His current research focuses on the Reichsgau Wartheland or "Warthegau," and he plans to write the first English-language study of this annexed western region of Nazi-occupied Poland. More specifically, Huener's research will consider the occupation regime's broad and at times murderous Germanization agenda in relation to the Warthegau's unique status as an experimental field for National Socialist policy, for it was in this alleged Mustergau that renaming villages, deporting Poles, planting trees, building roads, incarcerating priests, and killing Jews were all part of a larger Volkstumskampf to assert German racial superiority and German dominance in the future.

The project is based on three main propositions. First, it proposes that among the various Reichsgaue established in territories annexed to Nazi Germany, the Wartheland was unique with respect to its size, demographic composition, and especially the role it was to play in the Third Reich both during and after the war. Second, this study will argue that the structure and governance of the Warthegau facilitated the rapid, radical, and even murderous application of Nazi ideological goals. Third, it emphasizes that the Germanization program in the Warthegau was founded on Nazi racial ideology, but implemented broadly, encompassing not only "racial" population policies (immigration, deportation, mass killing), but also policies to transform the region's culture, economy, and infrastructure.

Huener has published articles on memory and commemoration at Auschwitz, Polish-Jewish relations, and the churches under National Socialism. Co-editor of three volumes on the history of National Socialist Germany, he is also the author of Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945-1979, which was awarded the 2004 Orbis Books Prize in Polish Studies from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and The Polish Catholic Church under German Occupation: The Reichsgau Wartheland, 1939-1945, which appeared with Indiana University Press in 2021.

Daan de Leeuw is a PhD Candidate in History at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. He holds a BA (cum laude) and MA (cum laude) in History from the University of Amsterdam. His MA thesis about German physicians as perpetrators of human subject research in German concentration camps has been awarded the Volkskrant-IISG Thesis Award 2014.

In his dissertation “The Geography of Slave Labor: Dutch Jews and the Third Reich, 1942-1945,” de Leeuw analyzes the trajectories of Dutch Jewish slave laborers through German concentration and annihilation camps. Drawing on a broad scope of sources, including survivor testimonies and Nazi administrative records, de Leeuw examines the movement of prisoners from camp to camp and how these transfers affected the social structures inmates created among themselves. He applies Geographic Information System (GIS) technology and cartographic tools to visualize the paths of individuals and groups of deportees to study the plight of Jewish slave laborers, to understand their agency and powerlessness, and to scrutinize the German effort to win the war through the ruthless exploitation of prisoners. De Leeuw’s doctoral project seeks to contribute to the knowledge on Jewish slave labor during WWII and to foster research on Holocaust geographies. At the Institute for Contemporary History, de Leeuw will study its archival collections to integrate the Nazi perspective about Jewish slave labor into his dissertation.

De Leeuw’s doctoral research has been supported by several fellowships and research grants, including a Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) Graduate Studies Fellowship, a Yad Vashem Summer Research Fellowship for PhD Students, a Prince Bernhard Cultural Fund Grant, and an EHRI Conny Kristel Fellowship. He will also hold a 2021-2022 Ben and Zelda Cohen Fellowship at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Alexandra Kramen is a PhD candidate (as of April 2020) in History at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she holds a Claims Conference Fellowship and the Marlene and David Persky Research Award. Her dissertation, Justice Pursued: The Struggle for Holocaust Justice in the Jewish Displaced Persons Community of Föhrenwald, 1945-1957, will explore how survivors living in the longest-running Jewish displaced persons (DP) camp in postwar Europe conceived of and acted upon justice for the Holocaust. The case study opens a new perspective on how Jews reestablished a sense of justice and coped with the trauma they experienced under the Nazi regime, while contributing more broadly to the study of transitional justice processes in the wake of mass violence. At the Institute for Contemporary History-Munich, she will analyze how interactions between Föhrenwald’s Jewish DPs, local Germans, and American occupation forces in and around Munich affected DPs’ conceptions of, and actions taken toward, justice. Her doctoral research has received additional support from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Leo Baeck Institute-New York, the Naomi Foundation, and Tel Aviv University.

Kramen received her B.A. in History and Political Science with special interest certification in Holocaust Studies from Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania. She subsequently earned a J.D. from Temple University Beasley School of Law in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and an M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies from West Chester University of Pennsylvania in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Her broader research interests include Jewish agency during the Holocaust, Jewish life in modern Europe, and modern Jewish displacement and diaspora.

Suzanne Brown-Fleming is Director of the Division of International Academic Programs at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies and a former Mandel Center Fellow (2000). She received her Ph.D. in modern German history from the University of Maryland-College Park in 2002. 

Project:

This project, Opa war ein Nazi: Eduard Geist and the Crimes of the Third Reich, is Dr. Brown-Fleming’s first attempt to research and write as both a decades-long scholar of the Holocaust and as the biological granddaughter of a devout and locally prominent Nazi. Inspired by local SA men and the speeches and writings of Adolf Hitler, Eduard Geist joined the SA in 1926 and the NSDAP in 1927. He became a senior administrator in the German Labor Front’s Koblenz headquarters, where he was involved with the Organization Todt-run Westwall labor camps. Initially the accounting inspector for over 120 camps with 125,000 conscripted workers, his duties would come to include confiscation of physical property (including Jewish properties) for the Westwall effort, and, by 1940, bank-held assets in Luxembourg. Also a soldier in the Wehrmacht, he fought in the infamous “Wolchow Kessel” on the Russian front. After the war, he was initially tried by a Spruchkammer as a Category 1 (“most guilty”) Nazi.

Zofia Trębacz is a historian and an assistant professor at the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, where she is currently a member of the ‘Encyclopedia of the Warsaw Ghetto’ project. She also coordinates ‘Bound by history. Polish-Jewish relations in Poland’ project. In 2018, she published a book Nie tylko Palestyna. Polskie plany emigracyjne wobec Żydów 1935–1939 [Not only Palestine. Polish plans for Jewish emigration, 1935–1939].

In her research concerning Jewish correspondence during the Holocaust, she is particularly interested in the emotions present in these letters – uncertainty, a sense of being lost, hope and its loss, sadness, fear, and especially fear for loved ones, helplessness. She thinks that taking a closer look at how victims of the Nazi persecution reacted could add a new viewpoint to the history of the Holocaust. It seems that based on the sources, it is possible to analyze how emotions influenced the decisions made and where the rational actions ended.

In her research, Trębacz pays special attention to the female narrative. Under conditions of occupation, women often took over responsibility for the families, and their role has changed. Many of them were still very young, and the drama of the war made that they grow very quickly. In her work, she wants to reflect on how the change of the social situation, especially the breakdown of families, built a sense of loneliness among women.

Katrin Antweiler is a doctoral researcher at the International Graduate Center for the Study of Culture at JLU Gießen. In her dissertation "Memorialising the Holocaust in Human Rights Museums. A Comparative Analysis of Memory as a Means of Government", Katrin investigates entanglements of Holocaust memory with the Human Rights project in the light of global governmentality. In doing so, Katrin is especially interested in the ideal of a historically literate global citizen and how it is conditioned by the Holocaust – Human Rights nexus. This work is based on three case studies of Human rights museums: the Nuremberg Trials Memorium in Nuremberg, Germany, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, Canada, and the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa. With a special focus on the narrative about the history of the Holocaust in relation to universal human rights that each museums conveys, Katrin probes contemporary Holocaust-memory politics and their impact on democratic imaginaries of the present and the future.

Katrin studied in Bremen, Tel Aviv and Berlin, where she received an M.A. in Cultural Studies from Humboldt-University. She won a Research Track Scholarship from the Humboldt Graduate School and holds a PhD-stipend from the International Graduate Center for the Study of Culture since 2017. She further received several research grants from the DAAD and is a member of the International PhD Programme Literary and Cultural Studies as well as associated to the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation at Nelson Mandela University. Katrin's wider interests are in Cultural Memory Studies, Studies of Governmentality, Decolonial Thought as well as Feminist Theory. She has lectured on Memory and Museum Studies at Humboldt University and is engaged as an educator at Holocaust-related memorial sites in and around Berlin.

Vlasta Kordová is a PhD candidate at the Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem. She holds a state rigorosum and a master's degree in Contemporary History from the Charles University (Faculty of Arts) and a bachelor’s degree in History and German Studies at the Charles University (Faculty of Education). In her doctoral project she focuses on the issue of anti-partisan warfare beyond the Eastern Front, i.e., the structure of the National Socialist (NS) repressive apparatus, its units and strategies used for eradication of enemies in the rear. 

She published a monograph and articles focusing on partisan warfare on the Eastern Front, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the Holocaust and on interpretation of the WWII in Central Eastern European countries. Kordová received the Jan Patočka Fellowship at the Institute für Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna with her project Victimization and Heroization of WWII in “history making” (concerned with post-Soviet Union countries). With academic consent of prof. Philipp Ther at the University of Vienna she fulfilled her research projects concerned with (NS) repressive apparatus supported by the Österreichische Austauschdienst. During her doctoral studies, Kordová collected research experiences in Poland, Germany and Austria.

The project examines the Holocaust as one of the crimes committed by the Nazis within anti-partisan warfare in the rear of the Eastern Front. It conceptualizes the Bandenbekämpfung employed by the Nazis (a central term since the summer of 1942) and demonstrates how this term was ideologically loaded (followed-up by the concept of Vernichtungskrieg – war of annihilation) and subdivides the Bandenbekämpfung into its constituent categories. This categorisation attempts to reveal the crucial difference between our current understanding of anti‑partisan warfare during the WWII and how the NS state understood the persecution of its enemies beyond the front.

Teresa Malice is research assistant at the chair of Contemporary history at Bielefeld University. Her current Habilitation project investigates female narrations of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Austria between the 1920s and 1940s, through diaries and letters. By looking at ego-documents produced by so-called “ordinary women”, in their majority uninvolved or only partially involved in the systems of power, the project aims to proof and possibly expand the analytic potential and complexity of the concept of bystander, challenging it through a comparative perspective and a gender-based perspective which takes into account as variable, together with the repression, intimidation and coercion operated by racialized and violent states, the patriarchal, likewise repressive nature of such states. The central part of the research will be centered around coeval writings describing the impact of violence, exclusion, anti-Semitism, deportation and the Holocaust in daily lives; while the final part of it will be centered around memoirs written in the immediate postwar, looking at the repercussions of the Stunde null on interpretations of past events and narrations of the self. At the Center for Holocaust Studies, Teresa is further developing her project and visiting the archive of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte.

Teresa received her PhD in 2019 at the University of Bologna, in cotutelle with Bielefeld University, with a dissertation titled “Transnational Imaginations of Socialism. Political Town Twinning between Italy and the German Democratic Republic in the 1960s and 1970s”. She graduated in 2013 at the University of Bologna with a thesis about the uprising of June 17, 1953 in East Berlin and its reception by the Italian left. In the past few years, she has been visiting fellow at Aarhus University, Denmark (2018), start-up fellow at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (2015) and Erasmus student at the Humboldt Universität Berlin (2012). She collaborates, in research, teaching and public history projects, with Fondazione Gramsci Emilia-Romagna in Bologna, and with Istituto storico della Resistenza e dell’età contemporanea di Parma.