Paula Oppermann

Junior Fellow (11/2019–07/2020)

Changing Circumstances, Stable Agenda. The Ideology and Actions of the Latvian Fascist Pērkonkrusts Party

This project focusses on the fascist Pērkonkrusts (Thunder Cross) party, examining how the organisation developed its ultra-nationalist, antisemitic ideology during the 1930s and contributed to the collapse of Latvian civil society through its attacks on Jews. On the basis of these insights, it will examine the role of the Pērkonkrusts during the Second World War. Its members were involved on various levels in the German machinery of occupation and annihilation.

When the Germans banned the party in August 1941, some of its members established contact with the national resistance, while others remained in the service of the occupiers. After the war, however, above all those members who had emigrated to North America and Western Europe established an image of the Pērkonkrusts men as patriotic resistance fighters. This project questions their narrative and uncovers continuities in political convictions and activities from the 1930s through to the postwar period.

Paula Oppermann studied history, Baltic studies, and Holocaust and genocide studies in Greifswald and Uppsala. She then worked in the Wiener Library and the Topography of Terror Foundation. Since 2017, she has been a doctoral candidate at the University of Glasgow, where she is examining the history of the Latvian fascist Pērkonkrusts (Thunder Cross) party. In the course of her doctoral studies, she has been a fellow among other places at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University of Uppsala.

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