Dr. Dallas Michelbacher

Dr. Michelbacher, who joined the Museum in 2019, contributes to multiple projects advancing Holocaust scholarship at the Mandel Center. He writes, translates, edits, and indexes entries for volumes IV (Wehrmacht camps) and V (SS and Police Detention Sites) of the Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945.

He is an expert on the Holocaust in Romania, and his current research focuses on Soviet prisoners of war in Germany and Romania.

Dr. Michelbacher is a Society for Romanian Studies liaison to the Southeastern European Studies Association.

He was a Claims Conference Saul Kagan Fellow in Advanced Shoah Studies in 2014–2016 and a graduate teaching assistant for two years in US History, Western Civilization, and World History.

Education

• PhD, modern European history, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, Michigan, 2016

• MA, history, Central Michigan University and Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Thuringia, Germany, 2015

• BA, history, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, 2011

Languages

• English

• German

• Romanian

Select Publications

• “The Lesser of Two Evils? Soviet Prisoners of War in Romania, 1941-1944” in The German-Soviet War: Combat, Occupation, and Legacies, ed. Jeff Rutherford and Robert von Maier (2025)

• Deportation in East Central Europe in the 20th Century: Snapshots of Invisible Incarceration, ed. Mihaela Martin, Dallas Michelbacher, and Michael Daniel Sagatis (2024)

• Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940-1944 (2020)

• “Anti-Semitism and Economic Regeneration: The Ustasha Regime and the Nationalization of Jewish Property and Business in Sarajevo,” in The Utopia of Terror: Life and Death in Wartime Croatia, edited by Rory Yeomans (2015)

Select Presentations and Interviews

• The Holocaust History Podcast, Episode 23: The Genocide of Soviet POWs