Monday, 26. April 2021, 15:00 - 17:00

Online: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81124963173?pwd=bm1pTjNCc0FUZE9uRVZxd0JSU3pNdz09

VWI invites the Department of Legal and Constitutional History at the University of Vienna

This research project focusses on the German jurisdiction in the General Government and how it treated and punished crimes committed by Jews, Poles, and ethnic Germans during the Nazi occupation of Poland. The presentation will address what the occupiers defined as a criminal offense and according to which legal basis these were prosecuted by the German legal entities. The focus lies on the German Court and the Special Court and their verdicts, since they sentenced not only Jewish but also Polish and ethnic German defendants for a plethora of so-called criminal offenses. From a micro-historical point of view, the presentation will examine the development of court verdicts throughout the occupational years in Warsaw and Radom. It thereby shows whether and why any changes within the juridical entities occurred – and whether and how these were connected to the occupation politics for the respective territories or the (un)successful course of the war. To this end, the occupation politics for the General Government will be discussed to reveal for which political and strategic purposes it was established. This is supported by a comparison of similar criminal offences committed by Jews, Poles, and ethnic Germans in order to reconstruct the way these German juridical entities treated criminal cases and offenders from all spheres of society – and lastly, to explore to what extent their verdicts were influenced foremost by their racial ideologies, occupational aims, and the course of the war.

Commented by Miloš Vec

Judith Vöcker is a Junior Fellow at the VWI and a doctoral candidate at the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Leicester. Before starting her doctorate, Judith studied Slavic studies and German literature and linguistics in Cologne, Cracow, and Moscow, and Eastern European History in Frankfurt an der Oder and London. Her PhD is funded by the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership and is supervised by Svenja Bethke and Klaus Richter.

Miloš Vec is Professor of European Legal and Constitutional History at the University of Vienna and was a Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM, Vienna) from 2016 to 2020. He completed his Habilitation in Legal History, Philosophy of Law, Theory of Law, and Civil Law at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. Until 2012, he worked and taught at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History. He also taught at the Universities of Bonn, Hamburg, Constance, Lyon, Tübingen, and Vilnius. He was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute of Advanced Study) in Berlin in 2011/12; a Senior Global Hauser Fellow at New York University in 2017; and an associate member of the Research Centre “Normative Orders” at Frankfurt University. He also works as a freelance journalist, especially for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Foto: Bundesarchiv, Bild 101 |-20-0298-14 | Foto: Amthor | Juni 1942

 Click here to download the invitation as PDF file.

In cooperation with: