Mittwoch, 26. März 2025, 15:00 - 16:30

Wiener Wiesenthal Institut, Research Lounge, 1010 Wien, Rabensteig 3

Paula Oppermann: Berlin Gestapo Reports 1933-1936. A Source Edition

The Secret State Police (Gestapo) was a pillar of the Nazi regime to monitor and create fear among the population. At the same time, many people denounced their neighbours and colleagues to the Gestapo. Gestapo officers summarised information in monthly reports for the political leadership. The major targets were the political opposition, from the KPD to right-wing conservative circles, the Jewish population, and the churches.

The reports are available for the period from 1933 to 1936. They reflect the reactions of the population to the Nazi regime in its early phase from the internal perspective of the police. The reports, which have been preserved in various archives and in some cases only in fragments, are being systematically made accessible for the first time in this source edition. In the talk, Paula Oppermann will present the current state of the project, its challenges as well as the potential of these sources for research and education.

Paula Oppermann is Research Assistant at the Historical Commission Berlin. She is currently working on the source edition “Berlin Gestapo Reports 1933-1936”. She studied history and Baltic studies at the University of Greifswald and Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Uppsala University. In 2022 she received her PhD from the University of Glasgow with a thesis on fascism and antisemitism in 20th century Latvia. From 2022 to 2023 she worked as a research assistant at the Chair of Contemporary History at Ludwig Maximilian University and coordinated a cooperation with the Centre for Holocaust Studies at the Institute of Contemporary History. Paula Oppermann has also been involved in historical educational work, including as research assistant at the Topography of Terror Documentation Centre and at the Wiener Holocaust Library. She has presented her research at international conferences and was a fellow of the Claims Conference and the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies.

Philipp Dinkelaker: Broadcasting Genocide Between Justification and Testimony. Media and Mass Violence since the 19th Century

Philipp Dinkelaker's habilitation project is currently still in the early conceptual phase and focuses on the representation of mass violence in the media since the 19th century. It deals with the tension between the level of information about and legitimisation of mass crimes in the media of the perpetrator (states) in comparison to the “knowledge” and evaluation of such events in the media of the rest of the world. Among other things, the question is how perpetrators communicate and justify their actions via mass media, what is known about incidents of mass violence in the world public in the temporal proximity of the crime and whether a meaningful comparative perspective can be derived from these questions.

Philipp Dinkelaker is a historian and author of the monograph Das Sammellager in der Berliner Synagoge Levetzowstraße 1941/1942 (transl. The collection camp in the Berlin synagogue Levetzowstraße 1941/1942) on everyday life and the visibility of the Holocaust in the capital of Nazi Germany. He did his PhD at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at TU Berlin. In 2022 he defended his dissertation “‘Worse than the Gestapo’?” Berlin Jews Accused of Collaboration during and after the Shoah” and won the Young Talent Award of the Historische Kommission zu Berlin e. V. Philipp Dinkelaker is currently working on his habilitation as Research Assistant at the Institute of History at Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

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