The Hugo Valentin Lecture 2015: Professor Dieter Pohl

The Hugo Valentin Center is pleased to announce that the historian Dieter Pohl of the Institut für Geschichte, University of Klagenfurt, will be the 2015 Hugo Valentin Lecturer. Pohl will lecture under the title "The New Empires of Violence 1930–1950". The lecture will take place in the University House on Thursday, February 26 at 17:00.

Dieter Pohl is a prominent name in contemporary European history, not least for his work on the organization, methods and crimes of Nazi Germany and the German armed forces in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the Second World War. With his 2008 study, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht. Militärverwaltung und Bevölkerung in den besetzten Gebieten der Sowjetunion 1941–1944 (new ed. 2011), Pohl made a significant contribution to the understanding of the nature and extent of the Wehrmacht's complicity in the crimes on the Eastern Front, in what Pohl described as "the most brutal military the occupation administration in history until then”.

This in contrast to the in West Germany where for a long time the notion spread that it was only the civilian Nazi German administration that was guilty of the crimes. Pohl defended his dissertation in 1995 on the thesis Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941–1944 and has, among other things, also wrote (with Frank Bajohr) about the Holocaust as an "open secret" both inside and outside Germany during the war. In addition, he has published a further considerable number of scientific articles and books in the same field in a broader sense. More recently, Pohl has also taken an interest in 20th-century mass violence in a global perspective, and at the lecture in Uppsala on February 25, he will speak on the topic "The New Empires of Violence 1930–1950: Global Perspectives on the Decades of Mass Violence ".