Frank Grelka, Academic Research Fellow. Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, European University Viadrina (Frankfurt/Oder), “Presaging the Holocaust? On the Water Works Camps of Lublin, 1940 – 1942” (June/July & September/October 2017).

This empirical research project investigates water works camps as an early venue for the lethal mistreatment of deportees from Polish cities and European countries to the Lublin District on a massive scale. Highlighting murderous living conditions in water works camps for Jews in the Lublin District I will try to explain the interrelationship of various geographically concentrated sites of persecution in the conglomeration of many spaces of a provisional ghettoization policy on German occupied Polish territory. The principal attraction of a spatial investigation of agricultural labor camps is twofold: First, the vast majority of all Jewish forced labor camps in the General Government were drainage camps with most of them apparently not investigated by scholars of the Holocaust. Secondly, since summer 1940 dislocations of parts of the Jewish population from the agglomerations into special water regulation projects in the Lublin District became the priority aiming at the exclusion of Jews from both the nutritional responsibility of the civil administration at Kraków. Developing this hypothesis, the researcher will analyze the internal correspondence of the Jewish Social Self Help, reflect on the Jewish labor agenda of the Hans Frank’s administration and investigate the plans of the Berlin Reich Ministries and the Wehrmacht in context of the campaign against the USSR since May 1940. At the Center for Holocaust Studies, I will therefore conduct research in the archives of the IfZ Munich, and archives at Ludwigsburg, Berlin, Bayreuth, Freiburg and Warsaw.

Andrea Kirchner is a current PhD Candidate at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main/Germany and a Research Fellow at the Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her project is entitled: "Richard Lichtheim (1885–1963) − From Constantinople to Geneva. A Political Biography".
 
She has previously received research grants from the Minerva Foundation, and Fellowships from the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem
as well as the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI).
 
Her dissertation deals with the political work and thought of Richard Lichtheim (1885–1963), one of the more important but so far under explored German Zionists that held various key positions within the Zionist movement before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. He served, among others, as the representative of the Jewish Agency in Geneva during WWII and in those years his office was a vital center of communication between Europe’s persecuted Jewish population and the capitals of the Western Allies. In Geneva he meticulously documented the events unfolding in Europe, pressed for diplomatic initiatives and was involved in various rescue and relief efforts. One of the main goals of this research project is to examine Lichtheim’s role within the relief and support network of Jewish organisations operating in Switzerland as well as the impact of the Nazi destruction of European Jewry on Lichtheims’s perception of Zionism.