Aktuelle Fellows des Zentrums für Holocaust-Studien

Natalia Aleksiun is the Harry Rich Professor of Holocaust Studies and Interim Director of the Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. She holds doctoral degrees from the University of Warsaw and New York University. Her research focuses on the Holocaust in East Central Europe.

She is the author of Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust (2021) and Where to? The Zionist Movement in Poland, 1944–1950 (2002), and the editor of Gershon Taffet’s The Destruction of the Jews of Zolkiew (2019). She has also co-edited The Cambridge History of the Holocaust: The Victims and Their Worlds, 1939–1945 (2025), The Rescue Turn and the Politics of Holocaust Memory (2024), Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 36, Jewish Childhood in Eastern Europe (2024), Entanglements of War: Social Networks during the Holocaust (2023), and Places, Spaces and Voids in the Holocaust (2021).

During her stay in Munich, she will conduct research on mixed marriages in western Ukraine during the Holocaust and complete a biography of Philip Friedman.

Benjamin Frommer (Ph.D., Harvard), Associate Professor of History, Northwestern University (Evanston-Chicago, USA),  is the author of National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), which was also published in Czech translation (Prague: Academia, 2010), and co-editor of Intermarriage from Central Europe to Central Asia: Mixed Families in the Age of Extremes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020).  His current book manuscript, The Ghetto without Walls: The Holocaust in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, examines the wartime destruction of one of the world's most integrated and intermarried Jewish communities. His research and writing have been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Program, the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, and the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He has received the Weinberg College Distinguished Teaching Award (2007) and held the Wayne V. Jones Research Professorship in History (2010-2012) and the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence (2013-2016). From 2013 to 2016 Frommer served as the inaugural Director of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University.

As part of the “Bonds of Intimacy” project at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Frommer is focusing on intermarried Jews and their children in the Slovak State during the Second World War.  In contrast to the treatment of mixed marriages in the neighboring Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (which Frommer explored in an article in his co-edited book, Mixed Families in the Age of Extremes), in Slovakia the Catholic ideology of the ruling regime clashed with its commitment to modern eliminationist antisemitism when it came to converted Jews, in particular those who had married so-called “Aryans.”  For a time, that conflict opened space for the intermarried to negotiate an intermediate status that exempted them from some antisemitic measures, including deportation.