“From Grey Zones to Red Courts – Soviet Collaboration Trials against Jewish Defendants”
Professional Background
Mr. Wolfgang Schneider is currently PhD Candidate in History at the University of Heidelberg (Germany). As the Edith Birnbaum Milman Fellow, at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Mr. Schneider will be conducting research for his study “From Grey Zones to Red Courts – Soviet Collaboration Trials against Jewish Defendants.”
Mr. Schneider is fluent in German, English, and Russian.
Mr. Schneider completed two internships in 2014. The first at the municipal archives of the city of Mannheim and his second at the Documentation and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma. In 2016 and 2017 Mr. Schneider worked as coordinator of the German-Russian-Ukrainian research project “Violence Against Civilian Victims on the Eastern Front of World War II”.
Mr. Schneider presented at the 2017 Fritz-Bauer-Institute’s IX: Interdisciplinary Workshop for PhD Students as well as at the 2017 workshop New Research on the History of National Socialist and Other War Crimes Trials at Marburg University’s International Research and Documentation Centre for War Crimes Trials.
Fellowship Research
While in residence at the Mandel Center, Mr. Schneider initiated research on the judicial treatment of Jewish defendants tried as collaborators with the Nazi regime, and its allies in the contexts of Soviet Jewish policy, and the development of the Soviet judicial system. Drawing on the Museum's resources, he sought to use the wartime and postwar trials, investigation records, and records of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee from the State Archives of the Russian Federation (GARF) to fill the gap of contemporary historiography on the Soviet judicial treatment of Jewish defendants tried as collaborators with the Axis powers in the aftermath of the war.
Mr. Schneider was in residence from December 1, 2017, to July 31, 2018.