Winson Chu

Senior Fellow (03/2024 – 07/2024)

The Lodz Ghetto and the Kriminalpolizei: Jews, Neighbours, and Perpetrators in the Holocaust

This project examines how local members of the criminal police in Nazi-occupied Poland participated in the Holocaust while promoting their "German-ness". Using their knowledge, the police men in the city of Lodz arrested and tortured their former neighbours, including those who were among the 200,000 Jews in the Lodz ghetto. An examination of official German documents as well as Jewish testimonies in Polish and Yiddish makes it possible to write the history of the ghetto from below and to understand how individual Jewish victims responded to their persecution. This approach views the history of the ghetto as a story of continuities, both spatially and chronologically, and offers a comprehensive account of German-Polish-Jewish interaction during the Holocaust as well as in twentieth-century Poland.

Winson Chu, Associate Professor for Modern Central European History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and author of The German Minority in Interwar Poland. He was a member of the board of the Polish Studies Association, the Scientific Advisory Board of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University and the Board of of the Central European History Society.

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