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 Time Magazine, Catholic News Service, Catholic News Agency, The Catholic Virginian, and La Stampa. She has appeared on CNN, EWTN Global Catholic Television Network, and in several documentaries, including Holy Silence (2020). Dr. Brown-Fleming leads the Museum's Vatican Archives Initiative.

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

• “The Rome Lectures: Father Marie-Benoît and the Path to Jewish-Christian Rapprochement,” In Holocaust Education Today: Confronting Extremism, Hate, and Mass Atrocity Crimes. The Ethel Lefrak Holocaust Education Conference Proceedings. Carol Rittner, ed. (Greensburg, PA: Seton Hill University, 2023), pp. 137-145

• “Pope Pius XII, Vatican Neutrality and the Holocaust: Case Studies from the Newly Opened Vatican Archives,” In The Vatican and Permanent Neutrality ,Herbert Reginbogin and Marshall Breger, eds. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington Books, 2022), pp. 105-118

• ‘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

• Panelist, The Vatican and Permanent Neutrality: A Book Discussion Addressing the Holocaust, the Cold War, and Ukraine, Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, Georgetown University, December 2022

• “Scavengers of Holocaust History: the Truth Is of Many Hues,” interview for November 2021 La Stampa article

• “‘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