PhD projects
Georgia Parsisson
Rwanda: The role played by child perpetrators during the genocide
Supervisors: Dr Zoe Groves, Dr Fransiska Louwagie and Dr Alex Korb
The genocide against The Tutsi and Moderate Hutu swept across Rwanda over approximately one hundred days from April 1994. With an estimated death toll of 850,000-1 million Rwandans, many ordinary people participated in the killing and destruction which swallowed the country. With widespread participation from all Rwandan communities, many perpetrators were children.
My research highlights the cruciality of child perpetrators for the success of the genocide. This project looks to explore the links between the Hutu extremist agenda and the use of child perpetrators, exploring the role children played in the success of the extremist regime. Whist there are strong historical debates around Rwanda, few historians speak in depth about the use of children as perpetrators, instead solely focusing on victims. This thesis aims to bridge this gap within the discussion, allowing new insights into the genocide to be seen.
Utilising testimony, the database of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the reports from non-government organisations, this thesis will allow for the history of Rwanda's next generation to be seen in a new light.
Julie Hurst-Whitehouse
Changing Spaces for Women’s Voices in Oral Histories of Holocaust and Genocide, 1945-2018
Supervisors: Dr Svenja Bethke, Dr Zoe Groves, Dr Clare Anderson and Dr Katherine Stone
My project will explore the methodology that is used to gather witness testimony of women’s experience of sexual violence, by drawing on the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath, the Holocaust, and the genocide in Cambodia.
Despite advances to how we understand patterns of violence against women during the Holocaust, and in genocide more broadly, studies linking gender and genocide through comparative analysis are rare. Furthermore, National Archive and Non-Government Organization (NGO) projects contain large quantities of primary testimony, but systematic research on how this testimony has been gathered and analyzed hardly exist.
My thesis chooses a comparative perspective at the intersection of historical studies, genocide studies, gender and memory by asking: How effectively can different methodological approaches help women to express the breadth of their experiences through witness testimony, especially when sexual violence is so often stigmatized in surrounding societies?
The aim of this thesis is twofold: it will first use a comparative genocide framework to assess how women’s experience has been articulated through oral history research. Secondly, it will examine how contemporary methodologies used by National Archives and NGOs, can either constrain or provide opportunities in the dialogue with survivors. The project will draw on historical analysis and methodologies developed by scholars and practitioners working for National Archives and NGOs. By bringing this work into dialogue with feminist approaches, I aim to identify practice-based methodologies that enables women to express their experience of sexual violence in genocide.
Namak Khoshnaw
The Filmmaker's Predicament: On ISIS, Media and the Kurdish Genocide
Supervisor: Dr Alexander Korb
During my 6-year practical-based PhD with documentary, I will look at the relationship between documentary and genocide, particularly in reference to the genocide carried out against Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s and by ISIS against the Yazidi Kurds in 2014.
I started my project in 2013 and have subsequently directed and produced eight documentary films for the BBC. Three of my films were directly related to the genocide - Slaves of the Caliphate, Policeman of Kirkuk and Life on the Rubbish Tip. In these films I tackle the idea of genocide from many different perspectives including the perpetrators, those against whom it is perpetrated, and those working to stop it.
All three films where made in hostile environments when ISIS were at their strongest in Iraq and Syria. It wasn't easy or safe to make those films but, as a victim of genocide in the 1980s
and as a filmmaker in the present day, I was determined that these stories be told. Part of my practice is to ensure that the people of Iraq and around the world do no forget the past.
For my final project I will be submitting the 3 films mentioned, and 25,000 words examining how these films intersect with the modern history of genocide against the Kurds, as well as looking in greater detail at how these films were made. I will also build a website with interviews with interviewees from the films, such as fighters from ISIS and survivors of genocide, and many other oral history testimonies.
James Thedham
Mostar and its people: Violence and its effect on ethnic identification, nationalism and social relations in Mostar between 1985 and 2000
Supervisors: Alexander Korb and Zoe Knox
The city of Mostar was subject to some of the fiercest conflict between Bosnian-Croats and Bosnian Muslims during the break up of Socialist Yugoslavia in the 1990s, with a number of historians viewing the actions that took place in the city as demonstrative of ethnic cleansing. Despite this, there has been little to no written work exploring the city directly, let alone Mostar at a local level. It is from this that this PhD takes its basis.
My research places a magnifying glass over Mostar and how its community developed and changed between 1985 and 2000. It specifically looks to analyse changes in ethnic identification, nationalist sentiments and, subsequently, social relations and how these factors may correlate to acts of violence. This research therefore does not only look to explore why ethnic aggression and acts such as ethnic cleansing can occur, but how these acts can grow and thereby affect a community.
Mostar is therefore looked at independently as, although part of the Croat-Bosniak War (1992-1994), it is also subject to its own micro ethnic climate. In order to do this, this study draws upon a range of sources including records from local government, religious bodies and sporting organisations while also including select oral accounts. These sources all allow Mostar's own history to be told, instead of blindly following the nationalist historical narratives that have arisen discussing the period.
Raphael Rues
Military Activities of German and Italian Fascists unit during 1943-1945 in the regions of Ossola and lake Maggiore
Supervisors: Dr Alex Korb, Dr Luca Fenoglio and Dr David Gentilcore
I have an overall interest in fields of modern history where interactions between economic, social, political and military aspects are involved. I am a part-time PhD student, working for the Swiss government and as the Risk Manager responsible for the Swiss National Roads network in Berne, Switzerland.
In my PhD project, I am studying the activities of German and Italian Fascist military units in Northern Italy during 1943-1945, specifically in the region of Ossola, situated between Simplon and Lake Maggiore.
Before arriving to the region, most of the German units fought on the Eastern front where they had been heavily involved in the genocide of Jews and massacres of Soviet citizens. My research aims to analyse the extent to which their deployment in anti-partisan warfare in Northern Italy was a matter of “Wein, Weib und Gesang” ["Wine, Women and Song"] for German troops, or rather a logistical extension of the war crimes and operations on the Eastern front.
The study will analyse the military, economic, social and political impact of the German and Italian Fascist presence in the region, focusing closely on specific round-up operations. This study will also explore the complex and multi-faceted partisan historical resources with the actual operational development of the Italian “civil war”. The analysis will use a multi-disciplinary perspective, and involve research in Italian and German.
Answering such questions will both help us to understand better the German and Fascist anti-partisan modus operandi in Western Europe during the period 1943-1945, the overall economic impact of these operations for the assessed region, as well as to quantify how much of the Partisans historical resources can be actually used to assess this specific type of operations.
Publications
SS-Police in Ossola and Lago Maggiore. Operations and war crimes, Insubrica Historica, Minusio Switzerland (2018)
Breve storia del I battaglione Panzer-Grenadier Regiment 2 della divisione Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler prima e dopo gli eccidi di ebrei sul lago Maggiore, Nuova Resistenza Unita, Verbania (2018)
I disertori tedeschi nei documenti del controspionaggio svizzero, Mezzosecolo 11, Centro Studi Piero Gobetti , Istituto Storico della Resistenza in Piemonte, Torino (1997)
Lauren Parsons
Seeking Justice and Atonement: British Legal Approaches to Dealing with Mass Murder after the Holocaust, 1945-1969
Supervisors: Dr Svenja Bethke, Dr Alexander Korb and Dr William Niven
When studying Britain and its ties to the Holocaust, most academics have examined to what extent officials knew this atrocity was occurring and why they did not stop it. Despite Holocaust memory playing a vital role in public life in Britain, research has hardly considered how it dealt with mass murder after the war.
My doctoral research addresses this gap in scholarly understanding by exploring the aspirations of, and approaches taken by, the British government to legally seek justice for the horrors perpetrated by the Nazi regime. Covering the period from 1945 to 1969, my PhD explores how during this time Britain became involved in both prosecuting major and minor Nazi war criminals, as well as pursuing redress for some of the victims who had suffered. Ultimately, my thesis investigates the role Britain played in the process undertaken by Germany to come to terms with, and attempt to atone for, its recent dark past.
Despite extensive research on the Holocaust and the new interest in legal approaches to dealing with the violent past, no scholar has yet examined Britain’s role in seeking justice for mass murder. Taking this as a starting point, I will be amongst the first to systematically examine how Britain legally dealt with the crimes committed by the National Socialist regime. My doctoral research covers how the British understood the Nazi atrocities, only later referred to as ‘the Holocaust’, and how they defined what Nazi persecution was and who could be deemed a victim of it. My thesis also questions if their involvement in seeing to it that Germany issued redress for its dark past ever made the British fear that they too would have to pay for their own historic crimes.
My research is not only relevant to the field of historical studies, but also the discipline of law. At the core of my PhD lies the moral and philosophical question of whether it is possible to ever atone for historical wrongs and how justice for them can be served. I ask what the British understood by the term ‘legal justice’ with regards to the Nazi atrocities and which legal means they chose to pursue so that future forgiveness and reconciliation between the victims and perpetrators may have been possible.
Judith Vöcker
Crime and Criminal Prosecution in the Warsaw, Cracow and Riga Ghetto during World War II
Supervisors: Dr Svenja Bethke, Dr William Niven and Dr Klaus Richter
In my PhD project, I examine the development of criminal prosecution of Jews, Poles, Latvians and 'Volksdeutsche' in the Warsaw, Cracow and Riga ghettos over the time of their respective existences during World War II. For my analysis, I will follow the model of Jan Grabowski, who divided the existence of the Warsaw Ghetto into three stages. By applying his model to my analysis of court files from all the ghettos, I will be able to record any sudden changes in the way the juridical and police entities sentenced criminal offences.
This will be supported by comparing similar criminal offences, committed by Jews, Poles, Latvians or 'Volksdeutsche' throughout the three stages in the respective ghettos. The focus lies on reconstructing the way juridical and police entities treated criminal cases and offenders from all spheres of society and to explore to what extent criminal persecution in the ghettos was influenced by the occupation tactics and policies.
The Warsaw, Cracow and Riga ghettos were chosen since they were set up in different occupation territories and periods of time, which could have had an influence on criminal persecution, especially of Jews. Furthermore, this comparison will also explore whether the deviating relations between the occupation forces, the ghetto society, the police and juridical entities, and the varied knowledge about the occupation strategies had an influence on their juridical system and sentencing.
The project will be able to show how citizens were treated by the punishment body depending on their nationality or religion, will ask whether clear legal regulations existed, and how being deprived of any rights affected the ghetto citizens.
Thus, my research contributes to a micro history of these ghettos, and their specific internal dynamics since ghettoisation caused a change of pre-war patterns of society and the legal sphere – as suddenly, Jews had to survive under life-threatening conditions.
Nadine Tauchner
Journalism between Nazism and Democracy: An intellectual biography of the Austrian journalist Otto Schulmeister
Supervisors: Dr Alexander Korb, Dr Paul Moore and Dr Elizabeth Harvey
Austria looks back on a belated scholarly discussion of its National Socialist past. The same is true for the profession of journalism. Playing an active part in the propaganda machinery of the “Third Reich” did not hinder journalists from having successful careers after the war.
One of them was Otto Schulmeister (1916- 2001), a famous and influential figure of the post-war press, whose upbringing, political affiliations, social networks and professional work offers a look into the political developments of the First Republic, Austro-fascism, Nazism and the Second Republic. He left behind an impressive paper trail and his personal estate forms the foundation of this PhD project.
Taking Otto Schulmeister’s biography as the unit of analysis allows me to identify long spanning continuities or contradicting patterns of thinking, as well as reinterpretations of concepts and ideas that are often studied in isolation of each other.
In employing methods of biography research, oral history and content analysis, my project is investigating how the Catholic milieu negotiated the transition from democracy to Nazism and back. How intellectuals perceived and discussed the idea of Democracy, Europe and National Socialism before, during and after National Socialism and what effects the changes from democracy to Nazism and back had on the press and intellectual movements?
At its core this project aspires to be a transnational and intellectual study of Austrian journalism that sheds light on how a journalist reacted and contributed to the changing course of Austrian and European history in the 20th century and the extreme intellectual conditions associated with those upheavals.
Joshua Cohen
The influence of the Holocaust on British anti-fascism, 1945-67
Supervisors: Dr Paul Moore and Dr Sally Horrocks
Even during the Second World War, Britain witnessed a fascist revival. In 1944, the British League of Ex-Servicemen and Women held an openly fascist meeting in London’s Hyde Park. At the war’s end, it was possible to be confronted both with newspaper photographs of the liberated Nazi camps and fascist street speakers claiming that, ‘not enough Jews were burned at Belsen’.
In 1948, Sir Oswald Mosley re-launched his political career after wartime internment, forming the Union Movement (UM). Writing about a UM march in Dalston, London that took place later that year, the historian David Renton (2000) commented: ‘Taking place just a few years after the Blitz and the Holocaust … it seemed inconceivable that there were still people who thought fascism was right. Yet this was the message of the march’. Renton echoes historians who have identified the Holocaust as central to a post-war British anti-fascist consensus, alongside the nation’s wartime record of fighting fascist powers.
Richard Thurlow (1988) suggested that the ‘chief accusation’ against post-war British fascists was their alleged support for the extermination of European Jewry. Despite assertions of this nature, the historiographies of British fascism, anti-fascism and Holocaust remembrance rarely interest in a study of the genocide’s impact on the opposing forces.
My thesis questions the extent to which the Holocaust shaped British anti-fascism in the period 1945-67. To address this, I will analyse the campaign strategies, propaganda, private discourses and memory cultures of a broad range of anti-fascist organisations. These movements include the Communist Party of Great Britain, the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party, the 43 Group, Yellow Star Movement and 62 Group. My thesis will make a political, structural assessment of these groups using primary archival materials. It will also interrogate oral life histories collected since the 1990s that document how individuals have reflected on the meaning of the Holocaust for their anti-fascist activism, and the complicating details behind their motivations for fighting back.
Karianne Hansen
“How do you know I am Norwegian?" Ethnicity and Race in the Nazi Concentration Camps
Supervisors: first, Dr Paul Moore, second, Dr Svenja Bethke
My thesis examines two distinctive groups of prisoners in the Nazi concentration camp system commonly referred to as Norwegians, meaning victims targeted as ‘Jews’ and those deported to the camps as ‘political’ prisoners from Nazi-occupied Norway.
The Nazis elevated certain populations as ‘Aryan’, a juxtaposition to the extermination of the Jewish people, which also found its extreme expression in the camps. Those Norwegian deportees, facing radically different classifications and occupying different positions in the spectrum of hierarchical positions in the camps, render them ideal subjects for focused, systematic research. I will examine if and how biographical and perceived social differences between the two groups played out in successive concentration camps. My work aims to probe the extent to which transnational discourses on race, ethnicity, and class as well as belief systems about group-belonging and SS racial categorisation played out within the dynamics of the Nazi camps.
My study is the first to critically analyse and deconstruct the experiences of those deported from Norway and classified in radically different ways in the camps, examining the interwoven relationship between the nation-state, race, and society. My thesis will contribute to the growing body of literature on the history of everyday life and social dynamics during the Holocaust. I aim to explore the multifaceted identity of concentration camp prisoners, thus contributing to the social history of Nazi persecution, going beyond narrowly framed national histories.
Betsy Inlow
Use of Holocaust Graphic Narratives within Museums
Supervisors: Alex Korb (History) and Sheila Watson (Museum Studies)
As the age of testimony draws to a close, the creation of Holocaust graphic narratives has become a popular method of keeping Holocaust memory alive. Pursuing Holocaust subject matter within popular culture media such as comic books and graphic novels has been proposed by scholars of Holocaust memory and education as a way for new audiences, including future generations, to engage with the Holocaust. Visitor engagement and audience development, similarly, are of perennial concern to the museum sector and the field of museum education. Inspired by the overlap between the pursuit of engagement within Holocaust memory and the pursuit of engagement within museum education, Use of Holocaust Graphic Narratives within Museums transposes the popular Holocaust memory hypothesis of Holocaust graphic narratives as effective engagement tools into the realm of museum Holocaust education. The project primarily seeks to discover whether there is a role for Holocaust graphic narratives within museum Holocaust education.
Considering the recent public interest in and development of Holocaust graphic narratives, it is important to conduct research into the future outreach of such media. Survivor testimony has become a staple tool within Holocaust education in museums in part because of its effectiveness for engagement. It has yet to be seen whether Holocaust graphic narratives, a visual story of testimony, can be an effective engagement supplement within museum Holocaust education.
Paul O’Shea
Friendship between male prisoners in Dachau, Mauthausen, and Sachsenhausen
Supervisors: Dr Paul Moore and Dr Svenja Bethke
My PhD will be the first systematic study of friendship between male prisoners in Nazi concentration camps (Konzentrationslager; KL). The study will demonstrate the importance of masculinity in the relationships of German, Austrian, and Spanish men and will shed new light on prisoner survival strategies, agency, power dynamics, and gendered relationships in extremis.
My research questions build from the premise that culture and conditions are highly influential on friendships, as has convincingly been demonstrated by scholars in various fields: what constituted friendship, how were friendships performed behaviourally, and how was friendship experienced emotionally in the KL?
The primary sources on which this study is based are memoirs and video interviews of survivors of Dachau, Mauthausen, and Sachsenhausen, which will be scrutinised for evidence of behaviours indicative of close bonds. Interdisciplinary literature is vital in identifying these behaviours as most scholars accept that there are gendered differences in the performance of friendship. It is important therefore, that historians studying friendship in the KL are sufficiently familiar with the research of gendered friendship performance, before analysing their primary sources. Serious engagement with primary sources, supported by the specialist literature on gender, friendship, and emotions, can help identify common indicators of bonds and intimacy among male prisoners, who might ordinarily not express such sentiments openly.
Robin Smith
Educating Nazi Germany: Resistance and Conformity in the teaching profession under the Third Reich.
Supervisor: Dr Paul Moore
My project, supported by the AHRC and Midlands 4 Cities Doctoral Training Partnership, focuses on the attitudes and motivations of the men and women who performed the key role of educating the youth of Germany in the period from the end of the Weimar Republic to the end of the Second World War. These educators would have been at the forefront of inculcating the regime’s prescribed values, attitude and conduct to the new generation and are widely regarded as a key element of the indoctrination of the young to accept Nazi ideology. Given the impact teachers would have had on the delivery of these values, their participation in the racialised curriculum imposed by the Third Reich is an area of study which deserves greater exploration to determine the extent that these professionals resisted or conformed with the significant changes to their profession the regime was enacting.
This project seeks to further our understanding of these educators through research using official records from the German Education Ministry, records of the National Socialist Teachers League, reports from the underground, contemporary comparative education theorists and memoirs of the pupils and educators themselves to establish how the new curriculum of the Third Reich, and its delivery, was experienced from the perspective of lower-level educators. The research focuses on a history from below approach using interaction with official organisations and experiences in the classroom to explore the reaction of education professionals to the changes to their role that made them a tool of the Nazi radicalisation of the youth of Germany.
Nick Walton
The German Civil Service from the Kingdom of Prussia to the Federal Republic of Germany: the historical development of the service, its principles, and its loyalties
Supervisor: Dr Paul Moore, Dr Svenja Bethke
My research project focusses on how the German Civil Service, originally an instrument of the monarch and state, has developed since its formation more than 200 years ago. In doing so, it explores whether a coherent set of guiding principles is attributable to the German Civil Service, and how changing political, social, and economic circumstances could have influenced their development. Further, in so far as civil servants traditionally owe loyalty exclusively to the state but are today expected to serve the public, a possible conflict of loyalty is investigated.
This research is linked to the work of the SBC particularly because civil servants were both victims of and willing accomplices to the crimes perpetrated by the National Socialists. The relationship between the German Civil Service and the National Socialists was therefore a complicated one. The German Civil Service is firmly rooted in law(s) and civil servants are taught to require a legal basis for every action to be taken (Rechtsgrundlage), which had disastrous consequences once the National Socialists adapted the existing laws to make the civil service the executor of party policy. Accordingly, from 1937 onwards at the latest, the German Civil Service could no longer be compared with its predecessor in the previous Weimar period, which it now resembled only in name, as was demonstrated by its actions in the coercive, and simultaneously collaborative, relationship between the National Socialists and the German Civil Service.
As an employee in the German public sector and having myself been appointed a civil servant in March 2021, I am interested in contributing to the understanding of the development of the German Civil Service into today’s modern institution.