Ms. Madeline James

Professional Background

Madeline James is a PhD candidate in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she also received her master’s degree for her thesis, “Domesticating the German East: Nazi Propaganda and Women’s Roles in the ‘Germanization’ of the Warthegau during World War II.” Her research focused on Nazi women’s propaganda to explore the relationship between Nazi gender and racial ideology, particularly in relation to the Nazi Germanization program in the Warthegau during World War II.

Ms. James has received several fellowships and grants from the UNC Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, including a one-year Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst research grant, the Spies Grant Award, and the Tau Epsilon Phi Graduate Student Fellowship. During her graduate studies, she has presented her work in various forums and conducted research in archives across Germany, Britain, and the United States.

Fellowship Research

Madeline James was awarded the Alexander Grass Memorial Fellowship for her dissertation project “Protecting the Volk: The Development of the Female Police from Weimar and Nazi to Postwar Germany.” Her project traces the continuities and divergencies in the development of the female police from the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany to the first postwar decade in East and West Germany. It explores the central role the female police played in carrying out state policies from the 1920s to the 1950s, particularly focusing on the profession’s function in the Nazi police apparatus and its officers’ ability to escape prosecution and continue working in the postwar period. James’ work specifically examines the institutional changes, the controversial debates about the female police inside and outside this institution, and the career paths and self-perceptions of female officers across the three periods. In doing so, she aims to provide insight not only into the significantly understudied integration of women into the police as a male profession and central state institution in 20th-century German history but also into the role of policewomen as supporters and perpetrators of racist Nazi policy and their highly gendered perception and treatment after 1945.

This fellowship affords Ms. James access to important archival collections held at the USHMM, particularly those related to the female police’s role in the persecution of Jews, Sinti and Roma, and other so-called asocial individuals, as well as the work of the female criminal police in Nazi-occupied Poland, specifically in the establishment of the Polen-Jugendverwahrlager Litzmannstadt (Polish youth detention camp in Łódź). In addition, Ms. James will also utilize files related to the two other Jugendschutzlager (youth “protection” camps), Moringen and Uckermark, for which the female police were responsible. This access will help her project provide a more nuanced and detailed discussion of the role of the female police within the Nazi system of persecution and terror.

Residency Period: January 1, 2025–April 31, 2025