Dr. Suzanne Brown-Fleming

Dr. Brown-Fleming joined the Museum in 2001 and directs special projects, particularly in the international realm, of large-scale, cross-office Museum projects that originate in the Mandel Center. 

Her work has been featured in the Time Magazine, Vatican News (the official news outlet of the Holy See), the Wall Street Journal, the Italian daily newspaper La Stampa, and the Catholic News Service (CNS). She has appeared on Cable News Network (CNN), EWTN Global Catholic Television Network, and several documentaries, including CNN’s Pope: The Most Powerful Man in History (2018); Holy Silence (2019), which premiered nationwide on PBS television in 2020; and, most recently, as an expert on the documentary The Nazis’ Cut and Run, premiering on ZED France in 2026.

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

• “Cardinals Michael Faulhaber and Aloisius Muench, the Holy See’s Secretariat of State, Surviving Jews, and War Criminals, 1945–1959,” In "We are living in a turning point ..." - Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber and the Catholic Church between Monarchy, Dictatorship, and Democracy (2025)

• “The Cold War, the Vatican’s Secretariat of State and German War Criminals,” In Catholicism at the Iron Curtain: The Vatican, West Germany and the Cold War, 1945-1965 (2025)

• “The Vatican Secretary of State and German War Criminals,” InWar and Genocide, Reconstruction and Change: The Global Pontificate of Pius XII, 1939-1958 (2024)

• ‘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

• “Rising antisemitism requires a clear Catholic response,” America Magazine, November 7, 2023

• “Vatican’s Silence on Holocaust was Shaped by Antisemitism and Caution, Archives Show,” Wall Street Journal, October 31 (Print Edition November 1), 2023

• “Pope Francis meets with delegation from US Holocaust Museum,” Vatican News, October 25, 2023

• SUR LA ROUTE DES MONASTÈRES, LA FUITE DES NAZIS (The Nazis’ Cut and Run) premiering on ZED France in 2026.