Caroline Cormier

Caroline Cormier’s dissertation examines the large-scale disruption to Jewish homes that took place in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. Specifically, her research explores the displacement of Jews from their private residences and their forced relocation into Nazi-designated ‘Jew Houses’, or Judenhäuser, in three of Germany’s major cities: Berlin, Dresden, and Hamburg. Beyond providing the…

Stephanie Corazza

Stephanie Corazza’s dissertation examines child welfare workers who rescued Jewish children during the Holocaust in France. She follows these workers as they navigated different sites of relief and rescue, including French internment camps, children’s homes run by charities, and foster family homes and institutions that sheltered children under social worker surveillance. This work was rarely…

Kim Wünschmann Ph.D.

“Jewish history, the Shoah and Germany’s Nazi past are fields of interest that have accompanied me for most of my conscious life. Already as a young teenager, I read the diary of Anne Frank, Imre Kertesz’ Fateless, Primo Levi’s works, Art Spiegelman’s Maus comic and other important works of Shoah literature which have profoundly influenced…

Richards Plavnieks

Cohort II Richards Plavnieks is a Ph.D Candidate in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He completed his dissertation, titled “Wall of blood: The Baltic German case study in National Socialist wartime population policy, 1939-1945,” under the supervision of Professor Christopher Browning. Using German-, Russian-, English-, and Latvian-language…

Sylwia Szymanska-Smolkin

Claims Conference Fellows come from, and are studying in, numerous countries. Sylwia Szymanska-Smolkin, originally from Poland, is one of the scholars whose research is partially funded by the Claims Conference. Sylwia is studying the Polish Police and their dealings with the Jewish population during WWII, but growing up in Jozefow, Poland, she was not really…

Ella Florsheim

Ella Florsheim PhD studied the revival of Yiddish culture in the Displaced Persons camps in Germany after World War II and especially the broad-ranging Yiddish press published in the camps. She is interested in the different expressions of this revival, such as literary and journalistic writing and theatrical activity, and in particular its connection to the…

Waitman W. Beorn Ph.D.

Dr. Waitman Wade Beorn is currently the Louis and Frances Blumkin Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and assistant professor of History at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.  He teaches courses in German history, European history, the Holocaust, comparative genocide, and historical methodology. Dr. Beorn received his PhD in History from the University of North Carolina-…

Eric C. Steinhart

Cohort I Eric’s dissertation, tentatively titled “Creating Killers: The Nazification of the Black Sea Germans, 1941-1944,” probes the relationship between SS Volksdeutsche policy and the prominent role of Soviet ethnic Germans in the Holocaust in southern Ukraine. In addition to his native English, he is fluent in German and has a command of Russian and…

Isaac Hershkowitz

Cohort I Mr. Hershkowitz writes, “My main area of research, rabbinic theological and sociological responses to the Shoah, has been reviewed (by Greenberg, Schindler, Polen, Farbstein, etc.), yet I feel it has not been appreciated enough by theological and moral researchers of the Shoah. Rarely can one find a rabbinic outlook cited as a legitimate…

Kierra Crago-Schneider

Cohort II Kierra Crago-Schneider PhD studied the day-to-day interactions among Jewish survivors (mainly those living in Displaced Persons centers), Germans, and American soldiers in postwar Munich, specifically through their involvement with the postwar German economy. Dr. Crago-Schneider has been interested in Shoah studies since she was a little girl and learned that her grandmother’s family fled from…