Dr. Monika Flaschka

Professional Background

Monika J. Flaschka received a Ph.D. in modern European history, a master’s degree in modern European history, and a master’s degree in biological anthropology from Kent State University; she earned a Bachelor of Science in psychology from the University of Arizona. Dr. Flaschka’s graduate study focused primarily on sexual violence committed by German soldiers in Nazi-occupied territories, with the bulk of her research conducted at the Military Archive in Freiburg, Germany and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Dr. Flaschka presented numerous papers on sexual violence and child abuse committed by German soldiers, sexual violence against Jews during the Holocaust, and the role of masculinity in sexual violence during war and genocide at conferences in the US, Israel, Austria, Canada, and the Czech Republic. Using Shoah Foundation testimonies, she has written about the rape of Jewish women and men in concentration camps. She published those analyses in “Only Pretty Women were Raped: The Effect of Sexual Violence on Gender Identities in Concentration Camps,” in Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel’s Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (University Press of New England, 2010) and “Sexual Violence: Recovering a Suppressed History,” in Simone Gigliotti and Hilary Earl’s Companion on the Holocaust (Wiley Blackwell, 2020).

Dr. Flaschka has taught at several colleges and universities, including Kent State University, The College of Wooster, Ohio University, and most recently Georgia State University. She is currently an independent scholar residing in Tucson, Arizona.

Fellowship Research

Dr. Flaschka was awarded a Broadening Academia Initiative Hybrid Fellowship for her research project, “Sexual Assault and Child Sexual Abuse during the Holocaust.” In this study, she will examine three specific instances of sexual violence that deserve more scholarly attention: male victims of sexual violence in concentration camps and ghettos, Soviet rape of Holocaust survivors during liberation, and child sexual abuse during the Nazi regime. These cases of sexual violence are important in and of themselves, but they are also important because their investigation contributes significantly to the overall historiography of sexual violence during the war and the Holocaust. Over the last few decades, it has become clear that sexual violence under the Nazi regime was far more common than scholars previously believed; analysis of these specific circumstances of sexual violence demonstrates that it was pervasive, taking a multitude of forms, with multiple categories of perpetrator and victim.

Fellowship Period: November 1, 2024–April 30, 2025