New third-party funded project

The project "The long shadow of collaboration. Comparative perspectives on dealing with former communist and social democratic undercover informants of the Gestapo after the Second World War in East and West Germany and Austria", funded by DFG and headed by PD Dr. Udo Grashoff, analyses how Gestapo collaborations of communist and social democratic members of the resistance were handled in the occupied zones and successor states of the "Third Reich."

The project asks which concrete significance the fact of collaboration had in the different country settings as well as in parties. In several subprojects, legal reappraisal, historiography, controverses that crossed state borders, party-internal reappraisal of National Socialism, and biographical continuities will be analysed. In doing so, a nuanced contribution will be made to the history of dealing with the National Socialist past during the Cold War.