“The Royal Warrant War Crimes Trials of Nazi War Criminals in British-Occupied Germany”
Professional Background
Ms. Beth Healey is a PhD candidate in history at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. She received her MA in history from Boston College in 2010. A native English speaker, Ms. Healey has reading proficiency in German. While in residence at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, she conducted research on her project, “The Royal Warrant War Crimes Trials of Nazi War Criminals in British-Occupied Germany,”
Ms. Healey has presented her research at a variety of conferences, including “The Business of Murder: Tesch & Stabenow and the Zyklon B Trial”, presented at the From War to Postwar Conference at the University of Kent, England, May 2015; “Ravensbrück on Trial: Perceptions of British Leniency in the Postwar German War Crimes Trials,”Chicago History Graduate Student Conference, November 3, 2012; “’A New Democratic Germany’: The Brandenburg Antifascist-Democratic Bloc Committee and the Reconstruction of Germany under Soviet Occupation, 1945 – 1950,” Chabraja Center for Historical Studies’ International Doctoral Workshop on Agency, Allegiance, and Resistance; and The Royal Warrant War Crimes Trials in British-Occupied Postwar Germany, poster presentation given at the Breaking Boundaries: Institute of Historical Research and History Lab Conference, Institute of Historical Research, London, March 24-25, 2014. She has received a Northwestern University Graduate Research Grant, a Northwestern history department Mellon research grant and a Teagle Teaching Fellowship with the Teagle Foundation, and a Jaffa and Larry Feldman Fellowship with the Auschwitz Jewish Center.
Fellowship Research
For her Stephen B. Barry Memorial Fellowship, Ms. Healey explored the evolution, execution, and effects of the Royal Warrant trials, where the British Army tried approximately 1,000 alleged Nazi war criminals between 1945 and 1949, with particular attention paid to the attitudes and ideas that shaped what became the distinctly British approach to prosecuting war crimes.
Ms. Beth Healey was in residence at the Mandel Center from September 1, 2015 to February 29, 2016.