Dr. Jürgen Matthäus

Following his work as senior historian for the war crimes investigations unit of the Australian Attorney General’s Department, Dr. Matthäus came to the Museum as a Pearl Resnick Fellow in 1994. He was subsequently involved in a number of the Museum’s research and archival acquisitions projects before he took over the Mandel Center’s Applied Research team, a position he has held since 2005.

The research division’s core projects include the Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 and its series of source volumes Documenting Life and Destruction: Holocaust Sources in Context. With his team of staff historians and contract researchers, Dr. Matthäus has shaped the in-house production of the Mandel Center’s publications and participated in fostering networks of Holocaust scholars within North America and beyond.

Dr. Matthäus has taught at universities in the United States, Australia, and Germany, and has published widely on a range of subjects related to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. He is currently working on a project that analyzes photo albums created by Germans deployed during World War II in occupied Eastern Europe.

Education

• PhD summa cum laude, history, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany, 1992

• MA, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 1986

Languages

• English

• German

Select Publications

• “Research note: 'The last Jews in Vinnitsa': Reframing an iconic Holocaust photograph”, in: Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2023

• (ed. with Th. Köhler, Th. Pegelow Kaplan, Peter Römer) Polizei und Holocaust. Eine Generation nach Christopher Brownings “Ordinary Men” (Paderborn/Boston: Brill/Schoeningh, 2023)

• “The Germans, the war in the East, and the Final Solution: A new look based on private photo albums”, Search and Research No. 39 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2023)

• (ed. with M. Cüppers, A. Lepper) From “Euthanasia” to Sobibor: An SS-Officer’s Photo Collection (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022)

• “Mit den beiden Juden-Mädchen bist Du ja gerade nicht sehr sanft umgegangen” in Der Spiegel Geschichte 2021/3 (2021)

• “Kriegsfotos auf dem Obersalzberg. Anmerkungen zu Eva Brauns Albumsammlung” in Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft (2021)

• Beyond “Ordinary Men”: Christopher Browning and Holocaust Historiography, coeditor (2019)

Select Presentations and Interviews

• “Resister in a Nazi Uniform,” April 2021 episode of the podcast 12 Years that Shook the World on SS officer Kurt Gerstein

• “Lovers in Auschwitz, Reunited 72 Years Later, He Had One Question: Was She the Reason He Was Alive Today?” December 2019 New York Times and December 2020 podcast

• “Alfred Rosenberg: Hitler’s Chief Ideologist and the Murder of the Jews,” November 2019 annual Raul Hilberg Memorial Lecture, Miller Center for Holocaust Studies, University of Vermont