The courses in the winter semester 2025/26 at the Chair for Contemporary History and Historical Migration Research focus thematically on the Holocaust and its consequences. An overview of the entire teaching portfolio of the Chair for Contemporary History and Historical Migration Research in the winter semester 2025/26 can be found on our website. In the winter semester 2025/26, Team NGHM offers one lecture, three advanced seminars, one proseminar, and three exercises. Additionally, several day excursions are included. The lecture by Prof. Dr. Christoph Rass provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of the Holocaust. The focus is on the emergence and radicalization of National Socialist Jewish policy, the development from social exclusion to systematic extermination, as well as the European dimension of the genocide. Special attention is given to the actors on both perpetrator and victim sides, the scope of action of various population groups, and the question of individual and collective responsibility. The lecture combines political, social, and cultural historical perspectives and discusses current research controversies. The seminar by Prof. Dr. Christoph Rass entitled “The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust. The German War of Extermination between Occupation, Exploitation and Genocide” (in English) examines the role of the Wehrmacht in the National Socialist war of extermination. Starting from the ideological preparation for the war against the Soviet Union, we analyze the entanglement of military units in mass crimes, cooperation with the SS and the Einsatzgruppen, as well as the systematic murder of Soviet prisoners of war. Central themes are individual and institutional complicity, the normalization of genocidal warfare, as well as forms of direct and indirect participation in the Holocaust. The seminar examines the agency of individual soldiers and officers, patterns of participation and refusal, as well as the contested legacy of Wehrmacht crimes in German memory culture. Through intensive source work, students develop competencies in the critical analysis of perpetrator statements and military documents. The seminar expands the English-language offerings for international students at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) and at the Historical Seminar. It is also directed at students in English Studies as well as in the Master’s program Conflict Studies & Peace Building. The colloquia by Prof. Christoph Rass are directed, as in every semester, at examination candidates in Bachelor’s and Master’s programs who are writing their theses on questions of contemporary history or historical migration research. Dr. Sebastian Musch addresses in his advanced seminar “Antisemitism and Racial Ideology in National Socialism” two of perhaps the most decisive ideological core concepts in National Socialist worldview. From which discourses and continuities did National Socialist antisemitism and racial ideology draw? What place did antisemitism and racism occupy among the intellectual precursors of National Socialism? How did antisemitism and racial ideology relate to National Socialist social Darwinism? On which antisemitic and racist theories did the intellectual precursors of National Socialism rely? And how did they use these for their own purposes? Finally: Did National Socialism have a coherent ideology of antisemitism? All these questions will be discussed in the seminar from an intellectual history perspective. For this purpose, we will begin with antisemitic theories in the 19th century and work our way through the emergence of pseudoscientific racial theory up to National Socialist rule. We will engage academically with key texts of National Socialism, as well as with texts from historical antisemitism research. The seminar “Words and/as Resistance: Thomas Mann and the German Listeners” by Prof. Dr. Christoph Rass, Dr. Sebastian Musch, Dr. Sebastian Huhn, Jessica-Sophie Wehner, and Annika Heyen examines Thomas Mann’s radio speeches as a historical document of the exile experience, as a medium of transnational communication in wartime, and as an attempt at political influence under the conditions of the NS dictatorship. Between 1940 and 1945, Thomas Mann addressed the German population in National Socialist Germany in monthly radio addresses via the BBC. These “Deutsche Hörer!” broadcasts represent a significant source for the history of intellectual resistance from exile. The focus is on questions about the reach and reception of these broadcasts, their function in the context of Allied propaganda, and their significance for German exile history. We analyze how Mann attempted to influence German society from his Californian exile, what messages and positions he conveyed, and how he commented on the developments of the war and NS rule. In doing so, we also examine the practical conditions of radio production in exile, cooperation with the BBC, and the question of the actual audience in the Reich. The seminar works intensively with original sources and places Mann’s radio speeches in the larger context of exile journalism, the course of the war, and the history of resistance against National Socialism. Methodologically, we combine media-historical, migration-historical, and political-historical approaches. The proseminar “‘Uprooted from their homes’ – Managing War-Related Migration through the International Refugee Organization (IRO)” under the direction of Jessica Wehner and Lukas Hennies is thematically devoted to violence-induced mobility and its consequences in the context of the Second World War. After the Allies ended the Second World War in Europe in May 1945 with victory over National Socialist Germany, challenges of a previously hardly known magnitude were revealed. Millions of people who had been deported, imprisoned, fled, and partly also voluntarily migrated during National Socialist rule and in the course of the Second World War found themselves in Europe outside their countries of origin. These refugees and Displaced Persons (DPs) formed a very heterogeneous group of various victim groups of National Socialism, Eastern Europeans who had fled from the Red Army in the last war years and after the war’s end, and partly also collaborators and war criminals who posed as DPs to escape prosecution by the Allies. The proseminar of Contemporary History and Historical Migration Research is explicitly directed at first-year students. As an introductory seminar, the course deals with the history of the Second World War and its consequences for European migration history in the immediate post-war period. The proseminar aims to provide critical approaches to research and insights into historiographical processes while simultaneously conveying fundamentals of academic work through propaedeutic work in a concrete thematic field. The seminar program is supplemented by three exercises: The research workshop “Digital History Workshop: AI & Personal Information Management for Historians” by Prof. Dr. Christoph Rass, Lukas Hennies, and Jessica-Sophie Wehner introduces the application of Artificial Intelligence in historical research and teaching. The focus is on the reflective use of AI tools for historical research, modern methods of knowledge organization and personal information management, as well as critical engagement with the epistemological implications of digital methods. Participants learn how they can use AI tools for source analysis, text generation, and data evaluation, how they can efficiently organize their research data and literature, and how digital methods change historical knowledge production. The workshop combines practical exercises with theoretical reflection on opportunities, limitations, and ethical questions in the use of AI in historical studies. Personal research projects can be introduced as application examples. The exercise “Occupation and Holocaust in Greece. Primary Sources between History and Memory” is offered by Dr. Dr. Valentin Schneider. Before the Second World War, approximately 72,000 Jews lived in Greece. After the occupation of the country from 1941, the Jewish population was almost completely deported to German concentration camps between 1943 and 1944 by the occupying powers Germany and Bulgaria following ghettoization, forced labor, and expropriation, and was exterminated there. More than 80 percent of Greece’s pre-war Jewish population was murdered in the gas chambers of the extermination camps Auschwitz and Treblinka. The goal of the exercise is to analyze the Holocaust in Greece using the microhistory approach, based on ego-documents and digitally accessible primary sources, e.g., from the Federal Archives and the Arolsen Archives. At the conclusion of the course, students present a short lecture on an analyzed document within the framework of a conference. This conference is organized in a comparative approach together with the sister course “Crime Scenes of the ‘Final Solution’: Minsk Ghetto and Extermination Site Trostenez.” Dr. Aliaksandr Dalhouski offers a course on the topic “Crime Scenes of the ‘Final Solution’: Minsk Ghetto and Extermination Site Trostenez.” In November 2024, the reconstruction and modernization of the History Workshop Minsk began. The History Workshop was opened in 2003 in one of the few preserved buildings from the pre-war period on the grounds of the former ghetto in immediate proximity to the former Jewish cemetery. The opening of a new exhibition is planned for March 2026. In this context, this course will examine the particularity of the Holocaust in Belarus using the example of the history of the Minsk Ghetto and the extermination site Trostenez, through work with biographies, archival documents, and artifacts found during construction work, in order to integrate them into the new exhibition spaces of the History Workshop. At the conclusion of the course, students present a short lecture on an analyzed document within the framework of a conference. This conference is organized in a comparative approach together with the sister course “Occupation and Holocaust in Greece: Primary Sources between History and Memory.”
This article is an English translation of the original German post: Lehrangebot NGHM@UOS im Wintersemester 2025/26