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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Lida-Maria Dodou

Junior Fellow (10/2021-08/2022)

Paths to Safety. Wars, Antisemitism and 500 Salonican Jews in their Quest for a Safe Haven, 1910-1938

This project examines the influence antisemitism had on a group of Salonican Jews, who acquired the Austrian citizenship between 1910 and 1938. This group consisted of members of the Salonican Jewish economic and political elite and their actions affected the way the whole community functioned. The aim is to identify the role of antisemitism in their decision to acquire another citizenship and in choosing the Austrian one to this end. It also seeks to reconstruct their mobilities across Europe during the interwar period. The project employs a transnational and transimperial perspective as well as the methodology of social network analysis.

Lida-Maria Dodou is a PhD candidate at the University of Vienna. Her research project concerns the Salonican Jews, who settled in the Habsburg Empire and is incorporated in the research cluster State, Politics and Governance in Historical Perspective. She holds a MA in Political Sciences and History from Panteion University in Athens, and was granted a fellowship from the Provincial Government of Styria, Austria, for her MA-thesis Economy, Society, Politics and the Relations between Greeks and Jews in Salonika, 1908-1913.

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Jonathan Kaplan

Junior Fellow (10/2018–06/2019)

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the German Democratic Republic and the National Socialist Past

This project deals with different perspectives on the post-war confrontation with the National Socialist past in the East German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. First, I analyse biographies of former members of the National Socialist Party and of other Nazi organisations who after 1945 developed a diplomatic career in the GDR. I then turn to the story of East German Jewish diplomats and politicians and portray their significant role in designing GDR foreign policy. The political attitude of these Jewish diplomats towards Israel, Zionism, and the Jewish world had a central place in their diplomatic activities. An example of confronting historical issues in actual foreign policies will be given by concentrating on the GDR’s international campaigns against former Nazi criminals in the Federal Republic. These efforts were followed by publishing incriminating material on former Nazis and by reaching out to and co-operating with international Jewish organisations. The confrontation of “the first Socialist state of workers and farmers on German soil” with its own past, despite its initial denial of this past, paints a fascinating picture of post-war German society that affects Germany to this very day.

Jonathan Kaplan is a PhD candidate in History at the Free University of Berlin. He holds a BA in Political Science and History and an MA in History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His MA thesis was entitled ‘The German Question’ in the East-German Historiography, 1945–1961. Culture, Territory and Enemies. From 2009 to 2012, he was a fellow at the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History.

Benedetta Carnaghi

Junior Fellow (09/2018–02/2019)

Feeding the Concentrationary Universe. How Nazi Spies Contributed to Deportation in the Second World War

Benedetta Carnaghi’s dissertation compares the activity of spies in the Italian Fascist secret police, called OVRA (Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell'Antifascismo), and its Nazi counterpart, the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei), from 1927 (the genesis of the OVRA) to 1945.

Her plan is to shift the focus from institutional stories of the police to a detailed analysis of the police informers’ profiles and motives, while using history as a tool for actively engaging in current debates about surveillance. The specific goal of her stay at the VWI is to lay the groundwork for a chapter of her dissertation that will investigate the connection between spying and deportation.

She aims to look at the scale and chain of command of the Nazi terror system from the bottom up: The last wheels of this system were spies, who pretended to be allies of the antifascist resistance members, but constantly worked to feed their names to the Nazi regime. Who were these spies? What motivated them to orchestrate the arrest and deportation of resistance members, Allied soldiers, and Jews?

Benedetta Carnaghi is a PhD candidate in History at Cornell University. She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, most recently from the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, the Chateaubriand Fellowship Program, the Lemmermann Foundation, and Trinity College’s Cesare Barbieri Endowment.
Her most recent article Three Layers of Ambiguity. Homosexual Spies and International Intrigue in Fascist Italy was published in the 2017 special issue of The Space Between. Literature and Culture 1914–1945.

Kathryn L. Brackney

Junior Fellow (10/2018–06/2019)

Phantom Geographies: An Alternative History of Holocaust Consciousness

My dissertation poses two major questions: Why have realism, fragmentation, and minimalism become the primary aesthetic conventions of Holocaust memory in Western Europe, North America and Israel? Before these conventions predominated, how did writers and artists describe the destruction of Europe’s Jewish communities? The sources in this project speak to the wide range of imaginative strategies used by figures such as Avrom Sutzkever, Anna Langfus and Claude Lanzmann to work through the past, and reveal an interplay between an under-studied surreal tradition of representation and more canonical modes of remembering the Holocaust. With a particular focus on spatial configurations of memory, I show how portrayals of victims and survivors have moved over time from an otherworldly “Planet Auschwitz” to the intimate domestic spaces of documentary testimony.

Kathryn L. Brackney is a PhD candidate in the field of modern European intellectual and cultural history at Yale University. Her research has been supported by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the USC Shoah Foundation, DAAD, and the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism.

Pavel Baloun

Junior Fellow (10/2017–07/2018)

“Slaughter them all!” Collective Violence and the Dynamic of Anti-Gypsy Measures in Czechoslovakia Between 1918 and 1942

This project examines the processes of creation and implementation of anti-Gypsy measures in interwar Czechoslovakia and after the Nazi occupation of Czech lands in 1939. The analysis focusses on the ways in which various state authorities such as gendarmerie, municipalities, district offices, courts etc. dealt with the population labelled as Gypsies and conflicted over their status, while simultaneously exploring their agency and defensive strategies. Another intention is to trace the demands for a ‘solution of the Gypsy question’ in the 1930s in order to explore the dynamic of anti-Gypsy measures at the beginning of the Second World War in Czechoslovakia and the Nazi-occupied Czech lands along with their violent consequences.

Pavel Baloun is a Ph.D. candidate in Historical Anthropology at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague. He is currently collaborating with the Terezín Initiative Institute on the project Database of the Roma Holocaust Victims in Czech Lands.

Elisabeth Weber

Junior Fellow (10/2017–07/2018)

The First World War and the Emancipation of Romanian Jews

Romania only decreed the full equality of its Jewish population immediately after the end of the First World War. There had been hefty conflicts over whether and how Romania’s Jews were to be emancipated since the middle of the nineteenth century, with the topic being considered by governments and Jewish organisations in Romania as well as in Western Europe and the USA. This project examines the debate surrounding the emancipation of Romania’s Jews during the First World War. The point of departure for this analysis is the Uniunea Evreilor Pământeni (Union of Indigenous Jews), founded in 1910, and its efforts towards the emancipation of the Romanian Jews and against antisemitism in Romanian society. As the activities of the union were always related to the actions and positions of the Romanian government, the great powers, and western Jewish organisations, these perspectives will – following Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann’s notion of histoire croisée – be examined in all their manifold interconnections. This will allow for the logic of the various agents to be examined against the background of the lines of conflict manifesting themselves during the war on the international, national, regional, and inner-Jewish levels.

Elisabeth Weber is a Ph.D. candidate in the research group The First World War and the Conflicts of the European Postwar Order (1914–1923) or: The Radicalisation of Antisemitism in Europe at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University in Berlin. From 2009 to 2013, she worked on various exhibitions at the Deutsches Historische Museum in Berlin. Since 2016, she has been involved in various book and exhibition projects among others for the Berlin City Museum.