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Imperial Lecagies

Imperial Legacies? (Dis) continuities and Comparisons between Colonialism and Nazi Rule

May 28 – 29, 2026 | German Historical Institute (GHI) Washington, Washington, D.C.

 

International Conference at the German Historical Institute Washington | Conveners: Ulrike von Hirschhausen (GHI Washington) and Robert Gerwarth (University College Dublin)

Photo Credit: Franz von Epp opening a school for colonialism in 1938, – Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H14239

Conference Venue, Hotel, Directions, and Transportation

Conference Venue

German Historical Institute Washington
1607 New Hampshire Ave NW
Washington, D.C. 20009

Hotel


The Churchill Hotel
1941 Connecticut Ave NW
Washington, D.C. 20009


Directions from the Dupont Circle Metro stop to the hotel and the GHI Washington


Public Transportation tickets

You can pay your DC Metrorail fare with a contactless credit or debit card using the “Tap. Ride. Go.” system at Metrorail station faregates, which works with physical cards, mobile wallets like Apple Pay or Google Pay, and smartwatches. To use the system, simply tap your contactless card or device on the faregate to enter and tap out to exit, and the fare will be automatically calculated and charged. Please note that “Tap. Ride Go.” currently only works for rides on the DC Metrorail. For Metro parking garages and lots, Metrobus routes, MTA, and partner regional bus providers, use mobile pay or reloadable fare cards to pay for your trips.

Directions from Dulles International Airport, Reagan National Airport, and Union Station to the hotel

FROM: WASHINGTON DULLES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT (IAD)

Metrorail – Silver Line

International Airport Dulles (IAD) is metro accessible. Follow airport signs to the metro entrance at Arrival Door 2 and 6. Purchase a SmarTrip Card from machines inside the metro station and take the silver line in the direction of Largo Town Center.Transfer at Metro Center to the red line in the direction of Shady Grove. Exit at the Dupont Circle station. Use the North Exit (Q Street). At the top of the escalator, go straight, cross Q Street and follow Connecticut Avenue for approximately 8 blocks uphill (you will pass Hillyer Place, R Street, S Street, Bancroft Place, Leroy Place, and California St.). Turn left into Wyoming Avenue, NW. The Normandy Hotel is located on the left-hand side on Wyoming Avenue. It is a 15-minute walk from the metro station.

FROM: REAGAN NATIONAL AIRPORT (DCA)

Metrorail – Yellow Line

Reagan National Airport (DCA) is metro accessible. To reach downtown Washington, DC, follow airport signs to the metro entrance, located outside (in front of the airport) on the upper level. Metrorail SmarTrip cards may be purchased from machines at the metro station. Please keep SmarTrip card handy during the ride; you will need it to exit the station. Metrorail hours of operation are weekdays 5:00am until 11:30pm and weekends 7:00am until 3:00am.

Take the yellow line in the direction of Mt. Vernon Sq./Fort Totten to Gallery Place-Chinatown. Transfer to the red line in the direction of Shady Grove to Dupont Circle. Use the North Exit (Q Street). At the top of the escalator, go straight, cross Q Street and follow Connecticut Avenue for approximately 8 blocks uphill (you will pass Hillyer Place, R Street, S Street, Bancroft Place, Leroy Place, and California St.). Turn left into Wyoming Avenue, NW. The Normandy Hotel is located on the left-hand side on Wyoming Avenue. It is a 15-minute walk from the metro station.

FROM: UNION STATION

Metrorail – Red Line

Take the red line in the direction of Shady Grove to Dupont Circle. Use the North Exit (Q Street). At the top of the escalator, go straight, cross Q Street and follow Connecticut Avenue for approximately 8 blocks uphill (you will pass Hillyer Place, R Street, S Street, Bancroft Place, Leroy Place, and California St.). Turn left into Wyoming Avenue, NW. The Normandy Hotel is located on the left-hand side on Wyoming Avenue. It is a 15-minute walk from the metro station.

Travel Reimbursements

How to request reimbursements for accommodation expenses

Participants requesting reimbursement for travel expenses from the University College Dublin: Please refer to instructions in the letter of invitation.

Participant Contact Information

 

Click here to see the password protected information

 
Schedule

Click on conference day to view that day’s full schedule

Thursday, May 28, 2026

9:30 – 10:30 a.m.

Welcome and Introduction

Robert Gerwarth (University College Dublin), Ulrike von Hirschhausen
(German Historical Institute Washington), Jonas Kreienbaum (Cork University), Richard Wetzell (German Historical Institute Washington)

10:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

Regimes of Subjugation and Exclusion

Chair: Richard Wetzell (German Historical Institute Washington)

Aviel Roshwald (Georgetown University) Imperial strategies? German Policies towards Jews in World War I and World War II

Birthe Kundrus (University of Hamburg)
The Long Death: Temporal Dimensions of Starvation in Colonial and Nazi Violence

12:30 – 1:30 p.m.

Lunch Break

1:30 – 3:15 p.m.

(Counter-)Insurgencies and Policing

Chair: Marie Muschalek (University of Basel)

Martin Thomas (University of Exeter) Suppressing Insurgencies within and outside Europe

Sven Reichardt (Konstanz University)
Raids and Policing under National Socialism. Colonial Connections and Discontinuities

 

3:15 – 3:30 p.m.

Coffee Break

3:30 – 5:30 p.m.

 

Concentration Camps between Internment and Mass Murder

Chair: Anna von der Goltz (Georgetown University)

Alan Kramer (University of Hamburg) From Concentration Camps to Extermination Camps – Global Trajectories

Jonas Kreienbaum (Cork University) The Use of Concentration Camps in German and British Colonies

6:00 p.m.

Conference Dinner

 
Friday, May 29, 2026


9:00 – 10:45 a.m.

Settlers and Resettlement

Chair: Meredith McKittrick (Georgetown University) 

Ulrike von Hirschhausen (German Historical Institute Washington) Settler Colonialism in Comparison

Rachel O’Sullivan
(Charles University Prague) Resettlement and Removal: Nazi Germany, Ethnic Germans and Settler Colonialism in Annexed Poland

10:45 – 11:00 a.m.

Coffee Break

11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Expropriation and Forced Labor

Chair: Bradley Nichols (University of Missouri)

Marie Muschalek (University of Basel) Expropriation in German South-West and Nazi-Occupied Alsace

Tanja Vaitulevich (Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre / Göttingen University) Reassessing the Legacy of Nazi Forced Labor

 

1:00 – 2:00 p.m.

Lunch Break

 

2:00 – 3:45 p.m.

Memory Debates

Chair: Rachel O’Sullivan (Institute for Contemporary History, Munich)

Edward Kissi (University of South Florida) Legacies of German Colonialism in West Africa and Reactions to Nazi Colonial Claims

Robert Gerwarth (University College Dublin) Multidirectional Memory? Anatomy of a Debate

 

3:45 – 4:00 p.m.

Coffee Break

 

4:00 – 6:00 p.m.

The Challenges of Exhibiting Mass Crime

Chair: Andreas Greiner (German Historical Institute Washington)     

Raphael Gross (German Historical Museum, Berlin), Clare Lawlor
(Imperial War Museums, London), Lisa Leff (United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.)

 
Organizers
Robert Gerwarth

Robert Gerwarth is Professor of Modern History at University College Dublin and Director of UCD’s Centre for War Studies since 2008. He is currently PI on the ERC Advanced Grant “Europe’ Age of Civil Wars, 1917-49′. His books and articles focus on the history of political violence, memory, and political culture.

Ulrike von Hirschhausen

Ulrike von Hirschhausen is a historian of imperial and global history, who is particularly interested in writing global biographies of indigenous actors. Her book, Empires: A Global History, 1780–1920 (co-authored with Jörn Leonhard, 2023), was longlisted for the 2024 Austrian Academic Book Award. Ulrike studied history at Amherst College and received her M.A. from Stanford University and her Ph.D. from the University of Tübingen. She earned her habilitation (second book) from the University of Göttingen. Her forthcoming book, due out in 2026, examines so-called “frozen conflicts” in the 20th and 21st centuries. The book focuses on disputed de facto states and proposes a new conceptual framework applicable to conflicts with contested statehood worldwide. Before joining the GHI as director in October 2025, she was a professor of modern European and global history at the University of Rostock and a fellow of Harvard’s Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global History in 2024/25.

 
Participants
Andreas Greiner


Andreas Greiner is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute Washington. His research specializes in infrastructure networks, their spatiality and materiality since the 19th century. He received his PhD in history from ETH Zurich. Before joining the GHI in January 2021, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Max Weber Program at the European University Institute in Florence. His first monograph Human Porterage and Colonial State Formation in German East Africa, 1880s–1914: Tensions of Transport (2022) explores the shifting role of caravan transport and human porterage in colonial East Africa, unveiling the resilience of precolonial structures in the era of “high imperialism.” His current research project examines the history of intercontinental airline networks before the “jet age.”

 

Raphael Gross

Raphael Gross is the President of the Foundation Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. Before assuming the role in 2017, he served as the Director of the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture and held the Chair of Jewish History and Culture at the University of Leipzig. Previously, he headed the Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt am Main, (2006-2015); the Fritz Bauer Institute, Frankfurt am Main, (2007-2015); and the Leo Baeck Institute, London, (2001-2015); as director.

Raphael Gross is a historian and the author and editor of numerous books on German-Jewish history and the Holocaust. Many of the exhibitions he initiated explore these and related topics. In May 2023 Raphael Gross was mandated to evaluate the provenance research of the Foundation E. G. Bührle in Switzerland. He presented his report to the public in June 2024.

 

Edward Kissi

Edward Kissi is a professor at the School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies, University of South Florida, and a member of the Africana Studies faculty. His research focuses on the post-20th century history of West and East Africa, the comparative history of genocide and human rights, and sub-Saharan African perspectives on the Holocaust. He has published on a wide range of issues including genocide and human rights in Africa, and the prospects and challenges of genocide prevention and global Holocaust and Genocide Education. In 2009, Kissi was invited by the United Nations to write “The Holocaust as a Guidepost for Genocide Detection and Prevention in Africa” for the landmark United Nations’ Discussion Papers Journal. He has since been involved in major national and international activities on Holocaust and Genocide Education, including UNESCO’s on-going initiatives on Holocaust and Genocide Education in Africa. His latest book Africans and the Holocaust (Routledge, 2019/2020) is a pioneering effort to integrate sub-Saharan African perspectives on the Holocaust into Holocaust Studies and incorporate Holocaust content into African history, and Africana Studies. Kissi has also been featured in the new National Geographic documentary Nazis at Nuremberg: The Lost Testimony which made its US debut in January 2023.

 

Alan Kramer

 

Alan Kramer is senior professor at the University of Hamburg and professor emeritus of Trinity College Dublin. He has published widely on the history of war, beginning with a co-authored book with John Horne on the phenomenon known as the ‘German Atrocities 1914’. In recent years he has branched out into the global economic, political, social, and cultural history of war, 1900-1945. His latest book, Concentration Camps: A Global History, was published by OUP in 2025. Current project: The Hidden Weapon. Blockade in the Era of the Two World Wars (ERC Synergy Grant).

 

Jonas Kreienbaum

 

Jonas Kreienbaum is lecturer for international economic history at University College Cork. He studied modern history, philosophy, and political science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he was awarded his PhD in 2013 for a thesis on colonial concentration camps in Southern Africa. He completed his Habilitation on the 1970s oil crises and the New International Economic Order at the University of Rostock in 2020. From 2023 to 2026 He led the DFG-funded project “Neoliberal Globalization or ‘Global Disconnect’?” scrutinizing structural adjustment programs in Zambia based at Freie Universität Berlin.

 

Birthe Kundrus

 

Birthe Kundrus, Professor of Social and Economic History at the University of Hamburg.
Main research interests: History of National Socialism, history of violence, postcolonial studies. Publications inter alia:
• »Dieser Krieg ist der große Rassenkrieg«. Krieg und Holocaust in Europa, München 2018
• Colonialism, Imperialism, National Socialism. How Imperial was the Third Reich?, in: Bradley Naranch/Geoff Eley (eds.) German Colonialism in a Global Age, Durham/London 2014, S. 330-346
• Transgressing the colour line. Policing colonial ‘miscegenation’, in: Oliver Janz/Daniel Schönpflug (eds.), Gender History in a transnational Perspective. Networks, Biographies, Gender Orders, Oxford 2014, S. 219-242.

 

Clare Lawlor

 

Clare Lawlor is Senior Curator for the Holocaust at Imperial War Museums (IWM),
funded by the Clore Duffield Foundation. Clare previously worked in the Public Engagement and Learning department at IWM and was responsible for producing the Holocaust Learning Programme for the new Holocaust Galleries at IWM London. On behalf of IWM, Clare has acted as a learning consultant to a range of Holocaust organisations in the USA, Poland, the Netherlands, and Lithuania, and has spoken at conferences in the United Kingdom and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

 

Lisa Leff

 

Lisa Leff is Professor of History at American University and Senior Advisor for Academic Affairs at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. A specialist in the history of the Jews in modern France, she is the author of Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth Century France (2006); The Archive Thief: the Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (2016); and co-editor, with Maud Mandel and Ethan Katz, of Colonialism and the Jews (2017).

 

Meredith McKittrick

 

Meredith McKittrick is Professor of History at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses on African and environmental history. Her research interests center on the intersection of race, colonialism, and the environment in Namibia and South Africa. Her most recent book, Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid (University of Chicago Press, 2024), won the George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History. Dr. McKittrick has also published on industrial agriculture, rainmaking, Christianization, and gender and generational relationships in the colonial era. She is now working on a long history of the Cuvelai River, a seasonal and endoreic river on the Namibian-Angolan border.

 

Marie Muschalek

 

Marie Muschalek received her Ph.D. in History at Cornell University. Her book Violence as Usual (Cornell University Press 2019; UNAM Press 2020) examines daily violent police acts and the normalization of imperial power in German Southwest Africa. She has worked as a research associate at the Concentration Camp Memorial of Neuengamme near Hamburg. She has taught and worked in the History Department at Freiburg University, at University College Freiburg, as well as in the History of Knowledge work group at Konstanz University. She was a postdoc within the research network History of the State Ministries in Baden and Württemberg under National Socialism, studying the quotidian culture of state bureaucracies in de facto annexed Alsace, 1940-1944/45. Between 2021 and 2023 she was a postdoc fellow at the Centre for Cultural Inquiry (ZKF) in Konstanz. In April 2024, Marie Muschalek joined the University of Basel with an SNF Starting Grant professorship.

 

Bradley Nichols

 

Bradley Nichols is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Missouri. A specialist in the study of the Holocaust and the Second World War, his research and teaching also encompass mass violence as a global phenomenon, with an emphasis on cultural genocide as a manifestation of colonialism. His forthcoming monograph with Cambridge University Press examines the everyday praxis and experience of Germanization on the home front of the wartime Third Reich. This book is based on his doctoral thesis, which was awarded the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize in 2017 by the Friends of the German Historical Institute. His previous publications have appeared in German History, Central European History, and The Bulletin of the German Historical Institute as well as in several edited volumes produced by Routledge and Bloomsbury Academic.

 

Rachel O’Sullivan

 

Rachel O’Sullivan is an Irish postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of International Studies, Charles University, Prague. She completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh and her first postdoc project at the Centre for Holocaust Studies in Munich. She has published on Nazi Germany’s population policies, ethnic German resettlement and the Holocaust in Poland using a colonial analytical lens, as well on the topic of the public debates on Holocaust remembrance culture and postcolonial memory in Germany. O’Sullivan co-edited the fourth volume of European Holocaust Studies with Michelle Gordon, titled Colonial Paradigms of Violence, which was published by Wallstein in 2022 and her book Nazi Germany, Annexed Poland and Colonial Rule was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2023. Her current project explores the concept of cultural genocide as it relates to the Holocaust and Germanization in annexed Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

 

Sven Reichardt

 

Sven Reichardt is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Konstanz. He works on the history of global fascism, on social movements and civil societies in Europe and the USA, the history of wars, civil wars and terrorism and on Environmental History with focus on war ecology, sustainable tourism and environmental knowledge in the 1970s. He had several international scholarships and fellowships, most recently, he had a fellowship at the ifk Vienna in 2025.

 

Aviel Roshwald

 

Aviel Roshwald is Professor of History at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, where he has taught since 1991. He obtained his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1987. He is the author of the following books: Occupied: European and Asian Responses to Axis Conquest, 1937-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2023); The Endurance of Nationalism: Ancient Roots and Modern Dilemmas (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914-1923 (Routledge, 2001); Estranged Bedfellows: Britain and France in the Middle East during the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 1990). He is the co-editor, with Richard Stites, of European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914-1918 (Cambridge University Press, 1999). With Matthew D’Auria and Cathie Carmichael, he is a co-editor of the two-volume Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

 

Martin Thomas

 

Martin Thomas is Professor of Imperial History and Director of the Centre for Histories of Violence and Conflict at the University of Exeter. He is a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow and a fellow of the Independent Social Research Foundation. A specialist in the politics of contested decolonization, his most recent book is The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization (Princeton University Press, 2024).

 

Tanja Vaitulevich

 

Tanja Vaitulevich, originally from Belarus, she currently serves an educator in charge of the International Youth Meeting Centre at the Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre in Berlin. She studied history and Dutch in Belarus, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. She is currently preparing her PhD thesis for publication, which she defended at the University of Göttingen in 2024. In her thesis, she focuses on the return of former forced laborers to the postwar Netherlands and Belarus. While recognizing that both countries encountered unique postwar challenges, her thesis critiques conventional East/West binaries in Europe and seeks a more nuanced understanding that moves beyond Cold War frameworks. She argues that the return experiences of forced laborers cannot be explained by geography alone, but by the interplay of individual experiences, societal factors, and historical contexts. Her research combines life-story interviews with extensive archival work in the Netherlands, Belarus, and Germany.

 

Anna von der Goltz

 

Anna von der Goltz is Professor of German and European History at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Her research focuses on the political and cultural history of twentieth-century Germany.   In 2008, her work on the Hindenburg myth (the subject of her first book) won the Wiener Library’s Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History. Most recently, her research has dealt with postwar German history, especially with political activism in the years around 1968. Her second book, The Other ’68ers: Student Protest and Christian Democracy was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. She is now embarking on a new project about political conversion stories in twentieth-century Germany.

 

Richard Wetzell

 

Richard F. Wetzell (Ph.D., Stanford University) is a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC and editor of the Bulletin of the GHI. His research has focused on the intersection of law, science, and politics in modern Germany. His publications include Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking Nazi Germany (co-edited, Cambridge UP, 2017), Crime and Criminal Justice in Modern Germany (ed., Berghahn Books, 2014), and Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880-1945 (UNC Press, 2000). He is currently writing a book on “Racial Science and Nazi Biopolitics, 1933-1939”