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Benjamin Frommer

Associate Professor of History

Ph.D., Harvard University, 1999
Curriculum Vitae

Interests

Geographic Field(s):  Modern European History: Central/Eastern Europe

Thematic Field(s):  Legal and Criminal History

Principal Research Interest(s):  Central European History

Biography

Benjamin Frommer (Ph.D., Harvard, 1999), Associate Professor of History, is the author of National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia (Cambridge University Press, 2005), which was also published in Czech translation (Academia, 2010). He has co-edited Intermarriage from Central Europe to Central Asia: Mixed Families in the Age of Extremes (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) and a special issue of The Journal of Genocide Research, entitled, Searching for Entanglement: Roma and Jews in Dismembered Czechoslovakia during World War II (2025). His latest book, The Ghetto without Walls: The Holocaust in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, is forthcoming from University of Toronto Press (2027).  His research and writing have been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the US Fulbright Program, Northwestern University’s Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, the Masaryk Institute and Archive of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. He has received the Weinberg College Distinguished Teaching Award (2007) and held the Wayne V. Jones Research Professorship in History (2010-2012) and the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence (2013-2016). From 2013 to 2016 Frommer served as the inaugural Director of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University.

Affiliated Programs

Publications

  • The Ghetto without Walls: The Holocaust in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming in 2027.
  • Searching for Entanglement: Roma and Jews in Dismembered Czechoslovakia during World War II. Co-edited with Kateřina Čapková. Special Issue of The Journal of Genocide Research 27:4 (Dec. 2025).
  • Intermarriage from Central Europe to Central Asia: Mixed Families in the Age of Extremes. Co-edited and introduced with Adrienne Edgar.  Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, June 2020.
  • National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), published in Czech translation by Academia Publishers (Prague, 2010).
  • “Privileged Victims: Intermarriage between Jews, Czechs and Germans in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,” in Intermarriage from Central Europe to Central Asia: Mixed Families in the Age of Extremes, edited and introduced by Adrienne Edgar and Benjamin Frommer, pp. 47-82. Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 2020.
  • “The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia,” in Prague and Beyond: The History of the Jews in the Bohemian Lands, ed. by Kateřina Čapková and Hillel Kieval.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2020. Published in German translation: “Der Holocaust in Böhmen und Mähren,” pp. 265-318, in Kateřina Čapková and Hillel Kieval, eds., Zwischen Prag und Nikolsburg: Jüdisches Leben in den böhmischen Ländern, transl. by Peter Groth. Munich: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020. Also forthcoming in Czech and Hebrew translations.
  • “Honorary Czechs and Germans: Petitions for Aryan Status in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,” in Petitions Resisting Persecution: Negotiating Self-Determination and Survival of European Jews, ed. by Wolf Gruner and Thomas Pegelow Kaplan. New York: Berghahn Books, forthcoming 2020.
  • “The Saved and the Betrayed: Hidden Jews in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,” Unlikely Heroes: The Place of Holocaust Rescuers in Research and Teaching, ed. by Ari Kohen and Gerald J. Steinacher (Lincoln, NE: Nebraska University Press, 2019), pp. 37-56.
  • “Verfolgung durch die Presse: Wie Prager Büroberater und die tschechische Polizei die Juden des Protektorats Böhmen und Mähren isolieren halfen” [Persecution through the Press: How Prague Bureaucrats and the Czech Police Helped to Isolate the Jews of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.] Leben und Sterben im Schatten der Deportation: Der Alltag der jüdischen Bevölkerung im Großdeutschen Reich 1941-1945, ed. by Doris Bergen, Andrea Löw and Anna Hájková (Oldenbourg: München, 2013), 137-150.
  • “Denouncers and Fraternizers: Gender, Collaboration, and Retribution in Bohemia and Moravia during the Second World War and After.” Gender and War in 20th-Century Eastern Europe, ed. by M. Bucur and N. Wingfield (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006).
  • “Getting the Small Decree: Czech National Honor in the Aftermath of the Nazi Occupation.” Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe, ed. by Pieter M. Judson and Marsha L. Rozenblit (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 267-282.
  • “Expulsion or Integration: Unmixing Interethnic Marriage in Postwar Czechoslovakia.” East European Politics and Societies 14:2 (Spring 2000), 381-410.

Teaching Interests

Undergraduate Courses

  • A Global History of Prisons and Camps.
  • Resisting the Nazis.
  • Holocaust Testimonies.
  • East-Central Europe under Communist Rule and Beyond, 1945 to the Present.
  • Europe since 1945.
  • History of the Holocaust.
  • Justice for the Holocaust? Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals.
  • Modern Europe since 1750.
  • Second World War in Europe.

Graduate Courses and Tutorials

  • Historiography of the Holocaust.
  • Historiography of Communist East Europe.
  • Historiography of Forced Migration and Genocide.
  • Historiography of Modern Germany.
  • Historiography of the Habsburg Monarchy.
  • Nations and Nationalism in Modern Europe.

Recent Awards and Honors

  • Visiting scholar, Center for Holocaust Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, Munich (2026).
  • Keynote address, Lessons and Legacies of the Holocaust Conference, Prague (2023).
  • Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies Course Development Fellowship (2022).
  • Keynote address, “Persecution at Home: Eviction and Resettlement of Jews within the City Space, 1938-1942,” hosted by the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, Vienna, Austria (2020).
  • Visiting Fellow, Masaryk Institute and Archive of the Czech Academy of Sciences , Prague, (2017).