Alina Bothe
EHRI-Fellow (12/2018)
The Persecution of Jews of Polish Citizenship in the German Reich 1938–1942
The persecution of Jews of Polish citizenship, called the ‘Polish Action’ in the language of the perpetrators, is a hitherto neglected area of the history of the Shoah.
This action constituted a large-scale persecution on the basis of citizenship which directly affected at least two thirds of the Jews of Polish citizenship living in the territory of the Third Reich between October 1938 and September 1939. This persecution continued to a lesser degree until 1942.
This habilitation project focuses on reconstructions and interpretations of this event in the framework of an integrated history involving both the process of radicalisation underlying the persecution as well as the experiences of the victims.
Alina Bothe is a post-doc fellow at the Institute for East European Studies at the Free University of Berlin. Prior to this, she was a research associate at the Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg. Her habilitation project has been supported by the Ernst Reuter Association, the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, and a Saul Kagan Fellowship for Advanced Shoah Studies from the Claims Conference. Her research has moreover been awarded with among other things a habilitation stipend from the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, with EHRI stipends in London, Warsaw, Jerusalem, and Vienna, as well as with Feldman travel grants from the Max Weber Foundation and an archive stipend from the Joint Distribution Committee. She was awarded a Teaching Fellowship from the USC Shoah Foundation. Her curated exhibition Ausgewiesen! Berlin, 28. Oktober 1938. Die Geschichte der ‚Polenaktion‘ is on view at the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin in the latter half of 2018. Her research and publication interests include the history of the Shoah and National Socialism, gender history, and digital humanities.