University of Nebraska at Omaha

Faculty Member, History

Assistant Professor of History, Louis and Frances Blumkin Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Loyola University New Orleans

Thesis Title: Descent into Darkness: Wehrmacht Complicity in the Holocaust in Belarus, 1941

About

I am interested in exploring German soldiers’ participation and complicity in atrocities and the Holocaust. Why and how did ordinary German soldiers decide to participate or not participate in the Holocaust and crimes against civilians on the Eastern Front during World War II? What was the impact of orders and policy from higher headquarters?  How did unit climates contribute to the ways in which German military units participated? My master’s thesis was a case study of one unit and its execution of the Jewish population of a small town in the Soviet Union and my dissertation work expands this methodology to larger units involved in the Holocaust in Belarus. Relying on military archival documents, post-war judicial testimonies, survivor testimonies, and visits to these sites, I present a detailed examination of the Wehrmacht’s complicity in the Holocaust which looks at how and why these units participated in the ways they did, at both the unit and lower policy level as well as the impact of the anti-partisan war and its ideological foundations.

  I am also interested in the complex interactions between occupiers and occupied in the Soviet Union as well the theoretical applications of spatial theory to issues of complicity and perpetration.

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