As a historian of Nazi Germany, Nazi racist population policies and the Holocaust, my research has focussed on both, the logic and practices of state persecution and how they affected, changed and, often enough, ended the lives of many people in Germany and across Europe. Currently, I am the recipient of a Leverhulme grant to work on a new book project that focuses on the emergence of the post-Second World War order.

Much of my work has dealt with the Second World War, questioning what drove Germany to plunge the world into this catastrophe, how it fought this war, its political consequences and the new moral and political world order that followed. Taking up my studies in Berlin right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was struck by both the wide support the Nazis had enjoyed at the time and the ongoing resistance of many Germans in the present to acknowledge this. This led me to work in memorial sites and exhibitions in Berlin and Hamburg like the House of the Wannsee Conference and the exhibition Crimes of the German Wehrmacht: Dimensions of a War of Annihilation, 1941-1944 amongst others. It was also the topic of some of my early publications (see here and here) as a student at the Free University Berlin and Sussex, that explored the life of Jewish German engineer Mac Goldsmith to show show how much of the expropriation of Jewish business owners relied on, and was driven by, the initiative of private individuals, often enough even former partners who had few scruples about exploiting the radicalising political climate. And while his case exemplifies the ever-narrowing room for manoeuvre for Jewish Germans, it also allowed me to show the resilience and resistance many of them displayed. Mac Goldsmith, for example, was able to help most of his relatives to escape Germany and follow him to the UK, where he established a range of new companies that became crucial for the British war effort and, ultimately, the defeat of Nazi Germany.

As a German non-Jew, however, I also felt compelled to analyse the perpetrators and the genocidal state they built. Convinced that the Holocaust could not be understood within the narrow confines of antisemitic ideology but had to be placed into the wider context of Nazi population policies, my PhD thesis at the Humboldt University Berlin focused on Poland, the epicentre of the new Nazi empire. In the book that came out of that thesis (also published in English), as well as in a number of articles that followed - for example on the genesis of the Wannsee Conference - I argue that these murderous population policies were not simply dictated by ideological considerations, but shaped by and subordinated to the dystopian vision of a vast German empire in Eastern Europe.

Eighty years after the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, we live - loosely quoting Gramsci - in a “time of monsters”, suffering under the collapse of the old order, but not yet able to replace it. Unsurprisingly, in times like these, the disappearing regime, its institutions and norms seem even more precious when giving way to the uncertainty of the interregnum. In my current project, ‘After the Nazis: Democracy and demographic engineering for a new European order’, I question some of these assumptions by exploring the potential for coercion and violence that democracies proved capable of when striving for a new political order during periods of systemic change in the mid-twentieth century. Allied victory, after all, did not end violence on the continent. It did also not disrupt once and for all one a most destructive logics of the modern nation state according to which securing political stability and economic prosperity required ethnic homogeneity – a logic that was at the core of some of the most brutal conflict in recent European history as I have shown in an edited collection together with my colleague Tim Buchen (University Wroclaw). And while the methods employed by the Nazis stand out for their genocidal brutality, some of the underlying demographic fears and calculations that fuelled them were also evident in, for example, the US analysis of and reaction to the Nazi refugee crisis before the war (see my article on the Evian Conference), and post-war planning during the war, leading the Allies to prosecute large-scale deportations and expulsions in its aftermath, in India and Palestine, but also in Europe.