Center Participates in Public Project to Strengthen Democracy and Fight Antisemitism in Germany
Before the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, Center director Dr. Thomas Pegelow Kaplan traveled to Germany to participate in an international conference on the role of the police during the Holocaust as well as one of the many initiatives to counter the rise in antisemitism in the Berlin Republic. As part of its broader goals of strengthening democracy and supporting civil society, the German Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale fuer politische Bildung) interviewed international experts in Holocaust and perpetrator studies on a range of key issues from Nazi ideology and the participation of the police in mass crimes to the prosecution of perpetrators and the role of language in Nazism. Participants included Prof. emeritus Christopher R. Browning (Tacoma, WA), Prof. Dan Michman, the director of Yad Vashem's International Institute for Holocaust Studies (Jerusalem), Yariv Lapid, the director of the USHMM's William Levine Family Institute for Holocaust Education (Washington, DC), senior public prosecutor Andreas Brendel (Dortmund), and Center director Prof. Thomas Pegelow Kaplan (Boone, NC). Excerpts of these interviews were recently made available on the websites of the Federal Agency for Civic Education. For Prof. Pegelow Kaplan's interview, see https://www.bpb.de/mediathek/305459/-zur-rolle-der-sprache-im-nationalsozialismus