Geraldien von Frijtag Drabbe Künzel is Associate Professor at the Department of Political History, Utrecht University (The Netherlands). She writes and lectures on contemporary European history with particular emphasis on the Holocaust, Nazi-occupied Europe, political violence, and conflict and war in 20th century Europe.  

While in residence, von Frijtag used the Visual History Archive to research Jewish-gentile relations in the Netherlands in the years just before, during and just after the Holocaust. She argues for a re-examination of the so-called myth of Dutch tolerance and advocate for in-depth and small-scale research into individual trajectories of Jews and their ‘emotional communities’. Professor von Frijtag concluded that her microhistorical approach and the contributions of the testimonies add to the understanding of the Holocaust in the Netherlands by bringing Jewish agency back into the story.  

Her latest book, Hitler’s Brudervolk, published by Routledge in 2015 examines the Dutch participation in the Germanization project of the occupied East and the engagement of Dutch ‘pioneers’ in the Holocaust by bullets.