31st Annual Symposium of the Friends of the GHI

2023 Prize Winner: Christina Matzen, Women’s Prisons and the Politics of Punishment in Nazi and Postwar Germany (Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of History, Univerisity of Toronto, 2022, Director: Doris Bergen)

The Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize is kindly sponsored by the Friends of the German Historical Institute. Since 1997 the Friends of the German Historical Institute have awarded the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize for the best doctoral dissertation on a topic in German history written at a North American university. For her Fritz Stern Prize lecture "Between Criminology and Genocide: Co-Witnessing Women and Antisemitism in the Nazi Prison System," Dr. Matzen will draw upon chapter 2 of her dissertation to explore encounters with antisemitism in a conventional German prison through the inmate files of Betty Oppenheimer and Dr. Selma Graf. Oppenheimer was devoutly Jewish and incarcerated for attempting to transport undeclared assets to England as she prepared to flee in the aftermath of the November Pogrom, and Graf was a Catholic convert and physician arrested for performing abortions. Entering the women’s penitentiary in Aichach, Bavaria in 1939, their records illuminate the spectrum and complexities of wartime Jewish life behind bars. Tracing the paths of their incarceration reveals that the sentences in Aichach were the first phase ultimately leading to their murder in concentration camps.