Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena

Kolleg Publications


The following section contains collected volumes emanating from the conferences and workshops held at the Imre Kertész Kolleg since its inception. Here you will find our most recent publications with Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group) as well as contributions by staff and affiliated researchers to our monograph series ‘Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century’, published by De Gruyter/ Oldenbourg.


 Investigating, Punishing, Agitating

Studien zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust, Vol. 8

Katharina Rauschenberger, Joachim von Puttkamer, Sybille Steinbacher (Eds.)

Investigating, Punishing, Agitating

Nazi Perpetrator Trials in the Eastern Bloc

Wallstein Verlag
ISBN 978-3-8353-5490-6
November 2023
291 pages

About 15 years after the end of the war, a second wave of trials against Nazi criminals occurred in many Eastern Bloc states, which followed a different logic than the ones immediately after the war. At the height of the Cold War in the 1960s, the trials on the one hand obliged cooperation between East and West, on the other hand they were determined by the defensive attitude towards the respective opponent in the system conflict. Within the Eastern bloc, unity was to be demonstrated through a coordinated approach on the international stage, while at the same time national interests led to their own paths in criminal prosecution. The essays collected in this volume are devoted to the history of criminal trials on National Socialist crimes in Hungary, the GDR, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union after the "thaw" and ask about the preconditions and peculiarities of these proceedings. What rules applied to the trials? What goals did they pursue? And last but not least: What significance did the Holocaust have in the clarification of the crimes?