Anna-Raphaela Schmitz

Junior Fellow (10/2016-04/2017)

Rudolf Höß. Behaviour, Relationships, and Private Life of a Concentration Camp Commandant

This dissertation project examines the personal networks and behaviour of Rudolf Höß and of the functional elite of the SS in Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is conceived as a scholarly examination of the commandant from the various perspectives of diverse groups of people, embedding these into the social context of the Nazi regime. From everyday and microperspectives of Höß, this project examines the planning and execution of the Holocaust. Employing a biographical approach grounded in practice theory, it analyses the parameters given by the Nazi leadership on the one hand and the guiding principles and social interactions of the perpetrators in Auschwitz on the other hand. Thus, the interactions of the SS men as well as the connections on both institutional and personal levels both in and outside the camp walls will be presented in a network analysis.

Anna-Raphaela Schmitz is a PhD candidate at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich and works as a research assistant at the Centre for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History. She completed her Magister in History and Political Science in 2010 at the University of Trier and received her M.A. in Holocaust Communication and Tolerance at Touro College, Berlin, in 2013. She was an EHRI Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies and a participant in the EHRI Summer School in Holocaust Studies at the Instituut voor Oorlogs-, Holocaust en Genocidestudies (NIOD) in Amsterdam.