Maayan Armelin earned her PhD from the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. She holds an MA in Social Psychology from the University of Haifa.
Armelin studies the SS-Einsatzgruppen, mobile paramilitary units that perpetrated mass executions of Jews and non-Jews in the USSR between 1941 and 1944. By integrating historical perspectives with paradigms, as well as social and psychological findings, she investigates how professional compositions and operational structures shaped the units’ vertical and horizontal social relations, and enhanced perpetration. Her postdoctoral project expands the perspectives on the Einsatzgruppen by looking into how victims, bystanders, and Austrian unit members (rather than Germans born in pre-1938 Germany) described and experienced leadership, cohesion, and compliance.