Dr. Suzanne Brown-Fleming

Dr. Brown-Fleming joined the Museum in 2001 and oversees its International Academic Programs, which ensure that the field of Holocaust studies remains vital and vibrant around the world.

Her work has been featured in the Catholic News Service, Catholic News Agency, and The Catholic Virginian. She has appeared on CNN, EWTN Global Catholic Television Network, and in several documentaries, including Holy Silence (2020). Dr. Brown-Fleming is a 2021 Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Contemporary History’s Center for Holocaust Studies in Munich and Berlin.

Her current research project, Il Papa Tedesco (The German Pope): Eugenio Pacelli and Germany, 1917–1958, is a study of Pope Pius XII’s relationship to Germany and its bishops, leaders, and people during the Weimar era, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust. Another current project, “Opa War Ein Nazi (Grandpa Was a Nazi): Eduard Geist and the Crimes of the Third Reich,” is Dr. Brown-Fleming’s first attempt to research and write as both a decades-long scholar of the Holocaust and the granddaughter of a devout and locally prominent Nazi.

Education

• PhD, modern German history, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, 2002
• MA, American diplomatic history, University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia, 1993
• BA, history and English, Virginia Tech University, Blacksburg, Virginia, 1991

Languages

• English
• German
• Reading ability in Italian

Select Publications

• ‘May Your Holiness Act in the Interest of Protecting Those who Remain Morally Thinking People’: Vatican Responses to Antisemitism, 1933 (2017)

• Nazi Persecution and Postwar Repercussions: The International Tracing Service Archive and Holocaust Research (2016, paperback 2019)

• The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience: Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Germany, 1946–1959 (2006)

Select Recorded Presentations and Interviews

• “The Danger of Indifference: Then They Came for Me,” June 2020 Facebook Live program
• “ ‘Our Mothers, Our Fathers’: One German Town in the Records of the ITS,” keynote address at a 2014 conference on “The International Tracing Service Collections and Holocaust Scholarship”
• Holy Silence, 2019 documentary film aired on PBS