Jochen Böhler
Jochen Böhler is a contemporary historian whose research focuses on war and violence in modern and contemporary European history. From 2000 to 2010, he established the research program “War and Foreign Rule in the Age of Extremes” at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw and curated a German-Polish traveling exhibition on Wehrmacht crimes in Poland in 1939. He was a fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. (2004) and at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem (2007–2008), as well as a research fellow at the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena (2010–2019). In 2017, he held a visiting professorship at the Sorbonne University in Paris; from 2019 to 2022, he served as acting professor of Eastern European History at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, where he continues to teach today—as he does at the University of Vienna. From 2022 to 2025, he was director of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies.
Contact: j.boehler@hgm.at.
Areas of Research
- Military History in the Age of the World Wars
- Holocaust Studies
- Imperialism and Nationalism
- Territorial Revision and Treatment of Minorities
- Transnational HistoryBorderland Studies
Current research
“My Polish Diary”: An edition and remembrance project on the memoirs of a gendarme from Austria in Nazi-occupied Poland
The Styrian Adolf Landl completed his memoirs entitled “My Polish Diary” in 1963. Landl was stationed in Poland as a gendarme during the Nazi era. In his more than 400-page autobiographical notes, he describes his professional career, his stationing in various Polish cities, most recently in Łopuszno in the Kielce district, everyday life at the various police stations, the relationship between the Reich German occupiers and Jewish and non-Jewish Poles and, above all, the acts of terror and war crimes committed by his unit, which prompted him to take action against the Nazi occupation. With this project, the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) would like to contribute to making Landl’s memoirs and the content covered therein more accessible to both scholars and the general public interested in history. https://www.nationalfonds.org/detail-view/6456
Publications
Jochen Böhler/Włodzimierz Borodziej/Joachim von Puttkamer (Eds.), Violence. The Routledge History Handbook of Central and Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century, vol. 4 (London and New York: Routledge, 2022)
Jochen Böhler/Vivian Hux Reed (Eds.), An American in Europe at War and Peace. Hugh S. Gibson’s Chronicles 1918–1919 (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2020)
Jochen Böhler, Civil War in Central Europe, 1918–1921. The Reconstruction of Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) (Polish: 2018) (English paperback: 2022)
Jochen Böhler/Robert Gerwarth (Eds.): The Waffen-SS. A European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)
Links
https://mmhv.academia.edu/JochenBoehler