Katrin Antweiler is a doctoral researcher at the International Graduate Center for the Study of Culture at JLU Gießen. In her dissertation "Memorialising the Holocaust in Human Rights Museums. A Comparative Analysis of Memory as a Means of Government", Katrin investigates entanglements of Holocaust memory with the Human Rights project in the light of global governmentality. In doing so, Katrin is especially interested in the ideal of a historically literate global citizen and how it is conditioned by the Holocaust – Human Rights nexus. This work is based on three case studies of Human rights museums: the Nuremberg Trials Memorium in Nuremberg, Germany, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, Canada, and the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa. With a special focus on the narrative about the history of the Holocaust in relation to universal human rights that each museums conveys, Katrin probes contemporary Holocaust-memory politics and their impact on democratic imaginaries of the present and the future.

Katrin studied in Bremen, Tel Aviv and Berlin, where she received an M.A. in Cultural Studies from Humboldt-University. She won a Research Track Scholarship from the Humboldt Graduate School and holds a PhD-stipend from the International Graduate Center for the Study of Culture since 2017. She further received several research grants from the DAAD and is a member of the International PhD Programme Literary and Cultural Studies as well as associated to the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation at Nelson Mandela University. Katrin's wider interests are in Cultural Memory Studies, Studies of Governmentality, Decolonial Thought as well as Feminist Theory. She has lectured on Memory and Museum Studies at Humboldt University and is engaged as an educator at Holocaust-related memorial sites in and around Berlin.

Vlasta Kordová is a PhD candidate at the Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem. She holds a state rigorosum and a master's degree in Contemporary History from the Charles University (Faculty of Arts) and a bachelor’s degree in History and German Studies at the Charles University (Faculty of Education). In her doctoral project she focuses on the issue of anti-partisan warfare beyond the Eastern Front, i.e., the structure of the National Socialist (NS) repressive apparatus, its units and strategies used for eradication of enemies in the rear. 

She published a monograph and articles focusing on partisan warfare on the Eastern Front, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the Holocaust and on interpretation of the WWII in Central Eastern European countries. Kordová received the Jan Patočka Fellowship at the Institute für Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna with her project Victimization and Heroization of WWII in “history making” (concerned with post-Soviet Union countries). With academic consent of Prof. Philipp Ther at the University of Vienna she fulfilled her research projects concerned with (NS) repressive apparatus supported by the Österreichische Austauschdienst. During her doctoral studies, Kordová collected research experiences in Poland, Germany and Austria.

The project examines the Holocaust as one of the crimes committed by the Nazis within anti-partisan warfare in the rear of the Eastern Front. It conceptualizes the Bandenbekämpfung employed by the Nazis (a central term since the summer of 1942) and demonstrates how this term was ideologically loaded (followed-up by the concept of Vernichtungskrieg – war of annihilation) and subdivides the Bandenbekämpfung into its constituent categories. This categorisation attempts to reveal the crucial difference between our current understanding of anti‑partisan warfare during the WWII and how the NS state understood the persecution of its enemies beyond the front.

Winson Chu is Associate Professor of Modern Central European History at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. As a Humboldt Research Fellow from March 2020 to August 2021 at the Center for Holocaust Studies, Dr. Chu is working on how locals serving in the Kriminalpolizei (German Criminal Police, Kripo) in the Central Polish city of Łódź/Litzmannstadt facilitated the Holocaust.

This work engages three interrelated aspects: the Kriminalpolizei as an organization of persecution, the continuing networks between the Łódź Ghetto and the rest of the city, and Germanization in occupied Poland. This integrated perspective reframes occupied Łódź as one city and follows interethnic ties across the interwar, war, and postwar periods. Dr. Chu completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley and was awarded the annual Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize given by the Friends of the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. His monograph, The German Minority in Interwar Poland, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012 and received a Fraenkel Prize commendation by the Wiener Library in London.

Dr. Chu is also the co-author of “A Sonderweg through Eastern Europe? The Varieties of German Rule in Poland during the Two World Wars,” which appeared in the September 2013 volume of German History and which was awarded the Article Prize of the German History Society. In 2017, he published “From Łódź to Litzmannstadt: German Pasts and Holocaust Sites in Post-Communist Poland” in Holocaust and Genocide Studies.