Forschung
Dr. des. Philipp Dinkelaker works in the fields of Holocaust Studies, German history in the 20th century, Antisemitism studies, history of the Second World War and antifascist resistance, memory culture and the history of Berlin. He published his first book Das Sammellager in der Berliner Synagoge Levetzowstraße 1941/42 about a previously underresearched Gestapo assembly camp for the deportation of Jews from Nazi-Berlin in 2017. The book also adresses the deportations as a public event.
Philipp Dinkelaker’s dissertation Worse than the Gestapo? Berlin Jews Accused of Collaboration during and after the Shoah was supervised by Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, Wolf Gruner Sebastian Voigt. Currently being transformed into a second book, the thesis analyzes how the question of alleged "Jewish collaboration" was handled in both post-war German states and among the German-Jewish survivors. Based on Jewish honor court trials, compensation files and criminal proceedings against German-Jewish survivors of the Shoah, Dinkelaker illustrates how Jews who had been forced by the Nazis to hurt other Jews were portrayed as eviler than the actual Nazi perpetrators. Closing gaps in research, Dinkelaker shows how the image of the “Jewish perpetrator” distorted the early reception of the Holocaust: As an important asset of denial of guilt antisemitism it deeply impacted the Vergangenheitsbewältigung (the process of coming to terms with the past) of both collectives – the victims and the perpetrators – in both East and West Germany during the Cold War.