During this summer, the first two EHRI Summer Schools in Holocaust Studies were held in Paris and in Munich. Both have now been succesfully concluded.

The EHRI Summer School in Munich was conducted by the newly founded Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute of Contemporary History Munich, an EHRI partner. Twelve international participants took part in the extensive programme. The goal of both summer schools is providing the participants (mostly graduate students) with an overview of current trends and lines of inquiry in Holocaust research as well as the necessary methodologies and techniques, especially as related to archives and digital databases.

Venue

For the Munich Summer School (led by Johannes Hürter and Andrea Löw, course organization by Giles Bennett), it was possible to secure the Politische Akademie Tutzing as a partner and venue for the first two weeks, while the program of the third week took place together with a group of North American participants of the Summer Academy 'German Sources and Archives of Holocaust History' of the Munich International Summer University (MISU) at Munich’s LMU University organized by Wendy Lower. The Center for Holocaust Studies was co-organizer of the Summer University. The EHRI Summer School was conducted in English, but passive German skills (for example for reading sources) were expected and sufficiently available among the participants.

Active Contribution

The topics of the (usually three hours long) lectures and seminar sessions led by renowned historians concentrated on the period of the events themselves as well as their immediate aftermath and covered questions such as the participation of diverse German functional elites in the Holocaust, the daily life of Jews in the ghettos under German occupation, Jews in Nazi concentration camps, as well as country and regional studies (Ukraine, the Netherlands, France). At all times the active contribution of the participants was expected, whether in the form of contributions to the seminars and work groups, independent archival research in the visited archives, as well as by way of presentation of their own respective research projects (for the topics, see below).

Excursions

The seminars were supplemented by excursions, for instance to the Concentration Camp Memorial Site in Dachau and the Obersalzberg Documentation. Archival tours were both intended to allow the participants to find sources relevant for their own research projects, but also to provide an overview of the different types of archives and their specificities in use by researchers.

Programme EHRI Summer School Munich

Later in 2013 you will have the chance to answer to a new call for the EHRI Summer Schools 2014, that will be held at NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Watch this site for more upcoming information about the EHRI Summer Schools.

Participants EHRI Summer School Munich

Morten Bentsen (Norway), Lecturer, Bjørnholt high school, working on post-1945 purges in two Norwegian police districts

Olof Bortz (Sweden), Graduate student, Stockholm University, PhD topic: Raul Hilberg and the Historical Memory of the Holocaust

Ionela Ana Dăsculțu (Romania), Graduate student in Jewish Culture and Civilization, Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest, recently concluded her MA on the Romanian Jewish Child in the interwar period

Anna Duensing (USA), Graduate Student, New York University, recently concluded her BA on the Holocaust and the early Civil Rights Movement

Borbála Klacsmann (Hungary), Research assistant, Central European University Budapest, currently researching the post-war restitution of Jewish property in two Hungarian towns

Katarzyna Kocik (Poland), PhD student, Jagiellonian University Kraków, PhD topic: The Central Welfare Council and its relation to the extermination of the Polish Jews

Daan de Leeuw (the Netherlands), MA research student, University of Amsterdam, working on Nazi doctors who were involved with the medical experiments on humans in the concentration camps

Oleg Romanko (Ukraine), Associate professor , Head of Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences, Crimean State Medical University, currently working on collaboration with the German occupier in Crimea

Dana Smith (USA), PhD candidate & teaching assistant, Queen Mary, University of London, PhD topic: Jüdischer Kulturbund in Bayern (1934-1938)

Jan Taubitz (Germany), Doctoral Student, Erfurt University, PhD topic: Video Testimonies as Catalysts of Remembrance: The Transformation of the Holocaust Since the 1970s

Tomas Vojta (Czech Republic), PhD. student/ teacher, Institute of International Studies, Charles University Prague, PhD topic: Conflicted Memories. Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War

Jack Woods (UK), PhD Student, University of St Andrews, Scotland, PhD topic: Castles in the Sky. The Role of Rumours in the Warsaw and Lodz Ghettos.