“The Flossenbürg Trial”
Professional Background
Nicholas Warmuth is currently PhD Candidate in Comparative History at the Central European University (Hungary). Mr. Warmuth earned an M.A. in Modern European History from King’s College London (United Kingdom). As the William J. Lowenberg Memorial Fellow on America, the Holocaust and the Jews, at the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Mr. Warmuth will conduct research for his project, “The Flossenbürg Trial: A Case-Study of American Social Perspective and Political Pragmatism through Judicial means in Occupied Germany, 1945-1947.”
Mr. Warmuth is fluent in English and German. He also possesses language skills in Hungarian.
Mr. Warmuth was a presenter, at the “Workshop on the History and Memory of National Socialist Concentration Camps and Extermination Sites,” held in Budapest, Hungary. Here, he presented his paper, Social Stigmatization and the United States Army Courts: The Flossenbürg Parent Trial, 1946-1947. He will be returning to the Workshop in March 2019 as an organizer, which is being held in Thessaloniki, Greece. In 2016, he presented his work, Max Demmel, An Angel in the SS? A biographical study of an SS guard at KL-Flossenbürg, and Uses and Abuses of “Common Design:” A critical analysis of the prosecution charges used in the KL-Flossenbürg Trial, at the “Perpetrators Studies Network” workshop, hosted by Utrecht University (The Netherlands). Mr. Warmuth previously worked as a Tutor and Lecturer for Simply Learning Tuition in London.
Fellowship Research
While in residence at the museum, Mr. Warmuth seeks to contextualize the Flossenbürg war crimes trials as a representation of the operational objectives of American transitional justice in Germany. He will conduct research to explore how and to what extent American occupational policy in Germany was characterized by the developing social and political elements of the postwar period. Mr. Warmuth will analyze the trial in a comprehensive manner and explore how and why the 51 accused were selected and put on trial. He will also question how prisoner identity was addressed in the court room, and how contemporary perceptions of identity at the time of the trail influenced both victims and perpetrators.
Mr. Warmuth will be in residence through July 31, 2019, and can be contacted at his museum email nwarmuth@ushmm.org.