Professor Doris L. Bergen

Professional Background

Doris Bergen is the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies in the Department of History and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Bergen was part of the team that designed the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa. Before coming to the University of Toronto in 2007, she held positions at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Vermont, and she has been a visiting professor in Jena, Warsaw, Pristina, and Tuzla.

She is the author of three books: Between God and Hitler: Military Chaplains in Nazi Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2023); War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (Rowman & Littlefield, 3rd edition 2016); and Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Bergen is also the editor of Alltag im Holocaust: Jüdisches Leben im Großdeutschen Reich, with Andrea Löw and Anna Hájková, (Oldenbourg, 2013); Lessons and Legacies VIII: From Generation to Generation (Northwestern University Press, 2008); and The Sword of the Lord: Military Chaplains from the First to the Twenty-First Century (University of Notre Dame Press, 2004.)

Fellowship Research

As the 2023-2024 J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence Bergen will be working on her project, “Hitler’s Chosen People: Defining Ethnic Germans in World War II and the Holocaust.” Her work examines how ethnic categories are created, policed, and challenged in the midst of extreme violence. Nazi racial policy in the territories conquered and occupied by German forces during World War II had two related parts: expulsion and eradication of those deemed “undesirable”—above all, Jews – and advancement of people considered “Aryan.” Beginning in 1939, as the Germans pushed out across their borders, the second half of this dual policy meant locating “Volksdeutschen” – ethnic Germans – people living outside Germany who identified themselves culturally as Germans (but not as Jews). How did Nazi officials determine who counted as ethnic Germans? How did Jews and non-Jews in conquered lands try to deal with the unstable category of “Germanness” and even turn its ambiguity to their advantage? How did concepts of Germanness change in the face of the dynamic wartime situation and with what repercussions?

Bergen's work-in-progress builds on research conducted in the 1990s, in newly opened archives in Poland and Russia and at the USHMM. She has produced a series of publications, starting with “The Nazi Concept of ‘Volksdeutsche’ and the Exacerbation of Antisemitism in Eastern Europe 1939-45,” Journal of Contemporary History (1994); and including articles in the Yearbook of European Studies and German Studies Review, and chapters in many edited volumes, most recently European Mennonites and the Holocaust, eds. Mark Jantzen and John D. Thiesen (2020). She is now returning to questions about the Volksdeutschen and the Holocaust in conversation with a surge of related research by Isabel Heinemann, Gerhard Wolf, Mirna Zakić, Eric Steinhart, Winson Chu, Alexa Stiller, and others.

Residency Period: October 1, 2023–June 30, 2024