Lukas Nievoll

Junior Fellow (02/2022-07/2022)

The Violent Order of Space: Spatial Development and Dynamics of Violence at Gusen Concentration Camp

My PhD-project deals with the relationship between space and violence in Nazi concentration camps, using the example of the Gusen concentration camp(s) from 1939 to 1945. I analyze how the spatial structure of the camp was changed over time and how this corresponded with the dynamics of violence. From a bottom-up perspective, I also investigate how prisoners experienced and shaped the changing physical and social reality of the camp.

Lukas Nievoll is a historian and, since October 2021, a university assistant at the Institute for Modern History and Contemporary History at the Johannes Kepler University Linz where he also pursues his Ph.D. Since 2021 he has also been a Doctoral Fellow at the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah in Paris. Between 2019 and 2021 Lukas Nievoll worked at the Center for Jewish Studies at the Karl Franzens University Graz in the research project Digital Memory Landscape - Persecution and Resistance under National Socialism.

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Suzanne Swartz
Junior Fellow (10/2014 - 08/2015)

Hidden Encounters: Interactions among Jewish and Christian Children in Nazi-Occupied Warsaw

This project examines the illegal, clandestine, and chance interactions among Jewish and Christian children in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Encounters most frequently came about through some form of resistance to Nazi authority. Contact took place within spaces that children created for themselves, such as smuggling or peddling rings, and within spaces or circumstances constructed or controlled by adults, such as orphanages, convents, or private homes where families hid Jews. Children’s interactions in dangerous situations were often complex combinations of both peaceful and combative, and motivations for assisting each other moved within gray areas of altruism and self-survival. This study examines children’s encounters in wartime spaces and across boundaries, to demonstrate how children moved within and pushed against limitations of Nazi oppression.

Suzanne Swartz is a History PhD candidate at Stony Brook University in New York, where she received her M.A. in 2013. B.A.: Colby College, 2007. Past program participation: German Historical Institute's Archival Seminar, Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellows Program. In 2012 she was a Lipper Intern for Holocaust Education at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. Research interests: children's resistance, Polish-Jewish relations, memory, Holocaust education.

Sari J. Siegel

Junior Fellow (03/2015 - 08/2015)

Between Coercion and Resistance. Jewish Prisoner-Physicians in Nazi-Camps

The research examines an important yet widely overlooked group in Holocaust history—Jewish inmates who utilized their medical knowledge in Nazi camps. Focusing on the labour, concentration, and extermination camp systems in the Reich between 1938 and 1945, it draws particular attention to the dynamic natures of camp conditions and the prisoner-physicians’ strategies to save their own lives as they attempted to treat fellow inmates and uphold their Hippocratic promise to ‚do no harm.‘ The work combines survivor testimonies and legal documents with contemporary government and organisational records for insight into how contextual variables and individual traits shaped the actions of these doctors in the camps. Since the prisoner-physicians’ medical activities placed them within survivor and memoirist Primo Levi’s ‚gray zone‘, analysis of their behavioral shifts allows to illuminate a new aspect of this morally ambiguous realm.

Sari Siegel is a doctoral student supervised by Prof. Wolf Gruner at the Univ. of Southern California. Born and raised in New York, she received her BA with Distinction in History from Yale Univ. She is the American recipient of the 2014 IfZ-USHMM Exchange of Scholars Award and a 2014-15 Kagan Fellow. She has presented her research at several international conferences, and her article Treating Dr. Maximilian Samuel: A Case Study of an Auschwitz Prisoner-Doctor will appear in a forthcoming issue of Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Justyna Majewska
Junior Fellow (11/2018–05/2019)

Visions of the Social Changes in the Warsaw Ghetto between 1940 and 1942

Analysing social changes that emerged in the Jewish community when trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto, my doctoral dissertation explores these shifts through the lenses of Jews, Nazi Germans, and Poles.
Drawing on social studies theories, I examine the Warsaw Ghetto as an area of various, rapid, and traumatic social changes. Originating in terror, plunder, and separation, these led to the pauperisation and degradation of social structures. My analysis is fixed between 1940 and 1942, when the isolated Jewish community was most susceptible to changes in social structure. Nevertheless, I show that various social and political processes had their origins in the 1930s and beyond.

First, I analyse the process behind the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto. Starting from the Nazi understanding of the term ghetto before the war, I scrutinise the process of establishing the Warsaw Ghetto in comparison to other ghettos in occupied Poland and in the context of the “Nisko” and “Madagaskar” resettlement plans.

Fears and predictions regarding life in the ghetto were core elements of the Jewish perspective. Responses to the imposed reality were rooted in personal experiences as well as the history of the persecution of Jews across Europe. Although the Nazis saw the Jewish community in the ghetto as homogeneous, it was a complex group. In the imposed ghetto reality, various political circles remained active. Zionists, Socialists, and Bundists, acculturated and religious Jews pondered not only how to survive the present but also their future. Intense debates focussed on the expected social structure of Jewry, the language Jews would speak, education, and the professions the post-war generation would pursue.

Finally, my dissertation addresses the issue of the Polish perspective on the ghetto phenomenon. Starting from Polish ideas of dealing with national minorities proposed by Polish right-wing politicians and intellectuals in 1930s, I aim to examine the extent to which Poles, especially the intelligentsia, were able to change their pre-war negative attitude towards Jews.
In the dissertation, I will use documents from the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto (Ringelblum Archive) as well as other wartime and post-war documents from the Jewish Historical Institute at Yad Vashem and the USHMM. I will also use documents of German authorities and draw from the Polish press and diaries of intelligentsia.

Justyna Majewska is a PhD candidate at the Graduate School for Social Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. She works in the Research Department of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. She is also a member of the editorial board of the Polish scholarly journal Zagłada Żydów. Studia i materiały (Holocaust Studies and Materials).

She received her MA in Cultural Studies from the Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin and completed a postgraduate certificate course in Exhibiting Contemporary History at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. She was an EHRI fellow at the Yad Vashem Institute. She is an editor of the Kalisz letters published by the Jewish Historical Institute in a series of scholarly editions of documents from the Ringelblum Archive. She has published in Zagłada Żydów. Studia i materiały and East European Jewish Affairs.

Maayan Armelin

Junior Fellow (10/2020 – 3/2021)

Leadership Styles and Social Relations in the SS-Einsatzgruppen

This doctoral dissertation studies the SS-Einsatzgruppen, mobile squads who murdered over a million and a half Jewish and non-Jewish civilians in the Nazi-occupied Soviet Union. The project explores officers’ leadership styles and particular social relations within the units and how these affected members’ apparent willingness to perpetrate mass murder. The research draws on historical literature discussing cohesion and comradeship in military and paramilitary units during the Second World War and traces the operating structures, cultures, and social relations of various institutions under the Nazi regime. Combining social psychological concepts such as social identity theory, inter-group relations, leadership, and conformity, the project analyses testimonies of former Einsatzgruppen members given in postwar Germany and Austria. It explains how crucial patterns of leadership and peer relations encouraged individual Einsatzgruppen members to engage in mass violence.

Maayan Armelin is a PhD candidate at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. She holds a BA in History and Psychology and an MA in Social Psychology from the University of Haifa. She has received fellowships from the Claims Conference (2014–2019) and EHRI (2017–2018) and previously worked at the Strochlitz Institute for Holocaust Research at the University of Haifa and on the editorial board of the Journal of Holocaust Research.

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Lukas Meissel

Junior Fellow (10/2020 – 8/2021)

The Perpetrator‘s Gaze. SS Photographs Taken at Concentration Camps

This PhD project focusses on perpetrator photography in Nazi concentration camps, specifically photographs taken by SS men and developed at Erkennungsdienste (identification departments). The images produced there include portraits of deportees, photos of prisoners conducting forced labour, construction sites and buildings in the camps, corpses of murdered inmates, events such as ceremonies or visits by delegations and Nazi officials, as well as private photographs of SS personnel. The aim of the project is to investigate not only what these pictures show, but to interpret them as visual perpetrator narratives of the concentration camps. The photographs highlight how the camps were supposed to work according to the SS, therefore they represent an idealised reality that never actually existed. A central argument of the project is that the photos played a decisive role in legitimising the camps within the SS and at certain points beyond the inner circle of perpetrators.

Lukas Meissel is a PhD candidate at the University of Haifa. His doctoral project analyses photos taken by SS men at concentration camps. Prior to his studies in Israel, he worked as a historian for the Jewish community of Vienna and as deputy chairperson of the Verein Gedenkdienst. He also worked on projects on behalf of Yad Vashem and guided numerous study trips. Meissel has held fellowships in Israel, the USA, Germany, and Austria and has published on visual history, Holocaust studies/education, and antisemitism.

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Connor Sebestyen

Junior Fellow (11/2020 – 5/2021)

German War Criminals 1945–1958. Their Oversight by the Allies, their Prisons, their Lives as Prisoners, and German Society

This dissertation uses a comparative approach to examine the imprisonment of German war criminals – many of whom were perpetrators of mass murder and genocide – by the Western Allies after the Second World War. There has been and is a great deal of scholarly attention paid to Allied war crimes trials, but there is to date little understanding of how the resulting sentences were carried out. If historians wish to understand postwar justice, how it was meted out, and how it was received by the German public, it is as important to understand the nature of the war criminals’ incarceration as it is to understand their sentencing and trials. This project examines how Western Allied prisons were administered and what role they played within the wider occupation. Drawing on archival material from the USA, UK, France, and Germany, my research shows how middle and low-level officials in the Allied military occupation governments paired with bottom-up grassroots pressure from broad sections of the German public to significantly influence the treatment of war criminals, the public understanding of their roles as perpetrators, and the implementation of mass amnesty.

Connor Sebestyen is a doctoral candidate in History and Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. His research interests lie at the intersection of military history, international relations, and the postwar social and judicial reckoning with the Holocaust. He has received fellowships from organisations such as Massey College, the Holocaust Education Foundation, and the Ontario, Canadian, and German governments. He has completed degrees at Trent University, Queen’s University, and the University of Oxford.

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Judith Vöcker

Junior Fellow (10/2020 - 8/2021)

“In the Name of the German Nation.”
The German Jurisdiction in Warsaw and Cracow during the Nazi Occupation

This PhD project focusses on the German jurisdiction in the General Government and how it treated and punished crimes committed by Jews, Poles, and ethnic Germans. It addresses what the occupiers defined as a criminal offense and according to which legal basis these crimes were prosecuted. This project focusses on the German Court and the Special Court and their verdicts, since they sentenced not only Jewish but also Polish and ethnic German defendants.

It examines the development of court verdicts over the years of Nazi occupation in Warsaw and Cracow. Thereby, it can show whether and why changes within these juridical entities occurred – or whether they were connected to the occupation policies regarding the respective territories or the successful/unsuccessful course of the war from the German perspective. To this end, I will discuss the occupation politics of the General Government to reveal which political and strategic purpose it was designed to serve. This is supported by a comparison of similar criminal offences committed by Jews, Poles, and ethnic Germans throughout the Nazi occupation. The focus lies on reconstructing the way in which German juridical entities treated criminal cases and offenders from all spheres of society and on exploring the extent to which their verdicts were influenced by their occupational aims, racial ideologies, and the course of the war.

Judith Vöcker is a doctoral candidate at the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Leicester. She has held fellowships at the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Programme of the AHRC and the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure and has been the recipient of several grants and awards, including from the German History Society, the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Prior to starting her PhD, she studied Slavic Studies and German Literature and Linguistics in Cologne, Moscow, and Cracow and Eastern European History in Frankfurt/Oder and London.

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Timo Aava

Junior Fellow (10/2021-08/2022)

Jewish Cultural Autonomy in Interwar Estonia and the Life Trajectories of Jewish Autonomy Activists After Its Dissolution

The principal aim of the project is to study Jewish cultural autonomy in interwar Estonia. The Law on Cultural Autonomy for National Minorities (1925) enabled ethnic minorities to establish their own self-governments to independently administer and fund through taxation their cultural and educational affairs. Two minority groups, Germans and Jews, established their self-governments. I aim to trace how Jewish autonomy was established and how it functioned. Furthermore, the aim is to analyse to which extent the Estonian Jewish community participated in broader debates over Jewish autonomy in late Tsarist and Revolutionary Russia. Furthermore, I will focus on some leaders of autonomy, and trace the trajectories that they experienced in these tumultuous years.

Timo Aava is a PhD student and a member of the ERC-funded project NTAutonomy in the East European History Department at the University of Vienna. He has also worked as a researcher at the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Historical Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He has studied history at the University of Tartu and obtained his MA in 2015. His main interests are the history of political thought with a focus on the end of 19th century and first half of 20th century, Baltic and Estonian history, Marxism, nationalism, non-territorial autonomy.

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Philipp Dinkelaker

Junior Fellow (10/2021-06/2022)

‘Jewish Collaboration’? – Honor Court, Criminal Court and Compensation Trials Against Shoah Survivors in post-National Socialist Germany

My PhD project deals with moral-ethical accusations and criminal proceedings against German-Jewish survivors of the Shoah, who were perceived as Nazi -collaborators ̨ in Cold War Germany. I analyze how German-Jewish survivors and the two German postwar societies treated Jews, who had been forced by the Nazis to hurt other Jews and embed this analysis into the wider picture of German Vergangenheitsbewältigung. With a new combination of sources, I show that accused survivors were not only brought to inner-Jewish honor courts. A considerable number of alleged Jewish Gestapo helpers was held accountable by German or Soviet law enforcement after the war, while the actual Gestapo perpetrators mostly got away.

Philipp Dinkelaker is a historian from Berlin, who recently published a monograph about the Sammellager Synagoge Levetzowstraße (a detention camp for Jews) in Nazi-Berlin. He is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin and has been a Junior Fellow at the Center for Holocaust-Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich.

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