Rebecca Boehling
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Professor of History, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Berthold Leibinger Fellow - Class of Fall 2016

Rebecca Boehling is Professor of History and Affiliate Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she was the founding director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities. She earned her PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and BA from Duke University. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Commission, German Academic Exchange Service, US Holocaust Memorial Museum Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, and the Volkswagen Foundation. She was Non-resident Fellow at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies in Washington, DC. From 2013 to 2015 she directed the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, which archives collections about Nazi persecution, forced labor, the Holocaust, and post-WWII Displaced Persons, as well as traces the fate of victims of the Nazis based on these collections.

 

Boehling has published on gender and politics and the return of German self-government after World War II, including her first book, A Question of Priorities: Democratic Reform and Economic Recovery in Postwar Germany (Berghahn, 1996). She began a comparative history of denazification in the Western zones of postwar Germany, at one point advising Iraqi exiles on how the model of denazification might or might not be appropriate for their plans for transitional justice in a post-Baathist Iraq. She interrupted this project to write (with Uta Larkey) Life and Loss in the Shadow of the Holocaust:A Jewish Family’s Untold Story (Cambridge, 2011), based on some 600 German-Jewish family letters written primarily between 1933 and 1955.

Project Description

Denazification and Transitional Justice: American, British, and French Approaches to Purging Nazi Influence in Postwar Germany

Boehling worked on a project that assessed the Western Allies’ approaches to the process of undoing Nazi influences in postwar German society, examining the divergent theories behind denazification and how they were implemented. She also considers the effects of Allied interactions with Germans during this purge process. Using a broad chronological and geographical framework of transitional justice, she begins with denazification as the intent to come to terms with, if not confront, the past, and then turns to attempts to achieve a level of reconciliation conducive to economic recovery and democratization. Berliners played an especially active role alongside the various Allied powers in denazification processes, of course, and Berlin provides a fascinating case study of how the Allied theories were put into practice—first by the Allies and then by Germans, in an increasingly divided city.

Academy Activities

10 Oct 16

Fellow Spotlight: Rebecca Boehling

Historian Rebecca Boehling was at the Academy to work on a project entitled “Denazification and Transitional Justice: American, British, and French Approaches to Purging Nazi Influence in Postwar Germany.” The project assesses Western Allies’ approaches to the process of undoing Nazi ...

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19 Dec 16

Western Allied Approaches to Denazification

Historian Rebecca Boehling examines divergent Western Allies’ theories behind denazification and how they implemented their policies once on the ground. How, she asks, did denazification develop from the intent to come to terms with, if not confront, the past, and to attempt a level of reconci ...

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