Professor Jonathan Huener

Professional Background

Jonathan Huener is the Leonard and Carolyn Miller Distinguished Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont, where he also serves as director of the Carolyn and Leonard Miller Center for Holocaust Studies. Dr. Huener has been the recipient of numerous research fellowships, including appointments as a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for Holocaust Studies of the Institute for Contemporary History, Munich, and at the German Historical Institute, Warsaw.

In addition, he is the author of Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945-1979 (Ohio University Press, 2003), which was awarded the Orbis Books Prize in Polish Studies from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and was a finalist for the Pro Historia Polonorum award from the Polskie Towarzystwo Historyczne, and The Polish Catholic Church under German Occupation: The Reichsgau Wartheland, 1939-1945 (Indiana University Press, 2021), which was likewise a finalist for the Pro Historia Polonorum award. Dr. Huener is also co-editor of four books, including The Arts in Nazi Germany: Continuity, Conformity, Change (Berghahn Books, 2006), with Francis R. Nicosia and, most recently, Poland under German Occupation, 1939-1945: New Perspectives (Berghahn Books, 2024), with Andrea Löw.

Fellowship Research

As the 2024-2025 J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence, Jonathan Huener will conduct research on his current book project, “Mustergau: Nazi Germanization Policy in the Reichsgau Wartheland, 1939-1945.” Building on research in Polish and German archives, he will be drawing on the Museum's extensive collections in examining National Socialist Germany's occupation and administration of the Reichsgau Wartheland, or “Warthegau,” a region of western Poland annexed to Nazi Germany in 1939. German officials often referred to this administrative district as a Mustergau or “model Gau,” which they imagined would serve as an experimental field for policies to be implemented in the Third Reich of the future. Dr. Huener's research focuses on the regime's Germanization agenda in the “model Gau”–an agenda understood as part of an ethno-racial struggle or Volktumskampf to be waged in the Wartheland. Broad, consequential, and ultimately murderous, Germanization took many forms, including the ghettoization, deportation, and annihilation of Jews, the deportation and mass killing of ethnic Poles, the murder of the disabled, the immigration of ethnic Germans, and the integration of Polish citizens of German heritage via the Deutsche Volksliste. Understood broadly, Germanization also meant waging the Volkstumskampf on other fronts of Warthegau culture and society, emphasizing the alleged German virtues of racial purity, order, discipline, and modernization in urban and rural planning, architecture, the arts, and education.

Residency period: September 3, 2024 – December 31, 2024 and May 15, 2025 – August 15, 2025