Marie Moutier-Bitan

Dr. Marie Moutier-Bitan graduated from the Sorbonne and EHESS. She has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at CERCEC as part of the Visual History of the Holocaust project. She is a historian specialized in the Holocaust in the occupied Soviet Union. For more than 10 years she worked as a researcher in the Yahad-In Unum association, led by Father Patrick Desbois. As a team leader and interviewer, Moutier-Bitan made more than twenty research trips to Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Moldova, and Lithuania. The assignments comprised interviewing witnesses to the extermination of Jews and locating shooting sites. Her doctoral thesis, supervised by Denis Peschanski, focused on “The License to Kill. The first step of the extermination of the Jews in Eastern Galicia, June 22 – August 1, 1941.” She was awarded several fellowships, including a fellowship at Yad Vashem (July 2018).

Moutier-Bitan published Le Pacte antisémite. Le début de la Shoah en Galicie orientale – juin-juillet 1941 [The Antisemitic Pact. The beginning of the Holocaust in Eastern Galicia – June-July 1941] (Passés composes, 2023), The Les Champs de la Shoah, l’extermination des Juifs en Union soviétique occupée [Fields of the Holocaust. The extermination of the Jews in occupied Soviet Union] (Passés composés, 2020). She wrote several works on the rescue of Jews and survival strategies in the occupied Soviet territories (Nouvelle Histoire de la Shoah, Passés Composés, 2021). She also explored in depth the correspondence of German soldiers (Lettres de la Wehrmacht [Letters of the Wehrmacht], Perrin, 2014, published in 11 languages). She has given courses and lectures at Paris I – Pantheon-Sorbonne and at the University Champollion of Albi, and regularly speaks at the Mémorial de la Shoah (Paris).