Dr. Melanie Güttler (née Hembera) holds a MA degree in Medieval and Modern History and Political Science from the University of Heidelberg, where she also earned her Ph.D. in 2014. Her dissertation was devoted to the history of the National Socialist persecution and destruction of the Jewish community in Tarnów, Poland. Dr. Güttler’s academic work included research inter alia at the Forschungsstelle Ludwigsburg of the University of Stuttgart and teaching at the Universities of Stuttgart and Tübingen. Currently she works as an archivist. For her doctoral studies Dr. Güttler received several fellowships, including from the German Historical Institute Warsaw, Targum Shlishi and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research granted her a Two-week Research Fellowship for Ph.D. Students from Abroad and she was an Institut für Zeitgeschichte – United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Exchange of Scholars Fellow.
Dr. Güttler’s postdoctoral research focused on the role of the Chancellery of the Führer of the Nazi Party in „Operation Reinhardt“ – the central National Socialist extermination program against the Jewish population in the extermination camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. She is also the author of Geschichte und Gedenken (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2019), pp. 27-44. Dr. Güttler´s book Die Shoah im Distrikt Krakau. Jüdisches Leben und deutsche Besatzung in Tarnów 1939-1945 (Darmstadt: WBG, 2016), the first research published in Western historiography about the progressive deprivation of rights and the annihilation of the Jewish population in Tarnów under German occupation.