Antisemitism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust
Tuesday, June 4, 2024 at 1:00 PM PT | 4:00 PM ET
At the close of World War II, the Allies labeled survivors of the Holocaust as either displaced persons (DPs), refugees, or stateless persons. These categories included Jews, Roma and Sinti, former forced laborers, and perpetrators who used the chaos to hide their identity. But as the scale of the humanitarian disaster became more apparent, the Allies were forced to refine these designations.
Christina Wirth, the USC Shoah Foundation's inaugural Robert J. Katz Fellow in Antisemitism Studies, explores postwar sorting processes and the roles officials, humanitarian organizations, and the DPs themselves played in shaping these categories. She further examines how antisemitism contributed to the establishment of a "Jewish DP" subcategory in the British Occupation Zone of Germany.
Christina Wirth, academic staff at the Leibniz Institute for European History and Ph.D. student at the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 1482 "Studies in Human Differentiation" Mainz, Germany, is the USC Shoah Foundation’s first Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Antisemitism Studies. She will be in residence at the Institute in April 2024. As part of the fellowship, Wirth will conduct research on Jewish survivors’ experiences of antisemitism in the immediate years after the Holocaust. This research is part of her broader dissertation project, entitled From ‘Displaced Persons’ to ‘Refugee’: Categorizing and Representing People in Transit (1944-1951).
