Jochen Boehler

Since 2022, I am the director of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies. An expert in Holocaust and perpetrator studies since two decades, during the last years I have extended my expertise to the First World War and its aftermath in Central and Eastern Europe. In Winter 2017/18, I have taught these combined fields of knowledge as Invited Professor at the Chaire d’excellence, LabEx EHNE (“Writing a New History of Europe”), Research strand 5: The Europe of Wars and the Traces of War, at Sorbonne University, Paris.

I have recently published with Oxford University Press (2018) and ZNAK (Polish translation) my book on what I call The Central European Civil War, 1918–1921, i.e. the battle for independence of nation states on the ruins of the fallen European land empires. This violent episode has almost completely vanished from European memory, and never been researched by historians consistently, transboundary and beyond national agendas.

Before stepping in as acting Chair for Eastern European History at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena (2019–2022), as a Senior Research Fellow, I have established the research area “War, Violence and Oppression” at the Imre Kertész Kolleg – Eastern Europe’s Twentieth Century (2010–2019). Comparative Historical Experience at Jena University, and co-heading (with Robert Gerwarth/University College Dublin) the research project The Waffen-SS: A European History (our project volume with the same title has been published by Oxford University Press), which focuses on the non-German “volunteers” this paramilitary ‘Nazi elite’ recruited – often by force – in whole Europe from Spain to the Soviet Union and from Norway to Italy.

Before, I have established and headed the research area War and Foreign Rule in the Century of Extremes at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw (2000–2010). In my PHD I have shown that during the attack on Poland in 1939, the German Army had largely participated in the killings of Jewish and non-Jewish civilians and prisoners-of-war, crimes that before had been attributed mainly to the Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei and the SS. I have thus stated that the Nazi War of Extermination had not started in June 1941, but in September 1939.
I have worked and studied in three continents and look back at two decades of lecturing experience on the history of violence in four languages (German, English, French, and Polish), and I am currently (since 2010) teaching classes of nation building in the 19th and 20th century, ethnic cleansing, war, conflict and violence in Central and Eastern Europe in comparative perspective at the Jena University. Several of my books have been translated into English and Polish, thus popularizing the violent history of Central Europe in the 20th century for a broader Western and Eastern European audience.