With a thoughtful push toward the future yet a deep appreciation for the past, Richmond native and noted Holocaust scholar Waitman Wade Beorn takes over as executive director of the Virginia Holocaust Museum on Aug. 1. Beorn was most recently an assistant professor of history and a Louis and Frances Blumkin professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
At his core, Beorn said last week by phone, his interests lie in those areas of the Holocaust that have gone mostly unstudied, particularly the role of the German soldier under Nazi rule. The numbers of commanding officers within the Third Reich were small compared with the millions of soldiers who participated, he said, and he has spent his career researching their stories, down to the lowest military levels. His first book, “Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus,” won the 2014 Harvard University Press’ Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize. Read More