Bastiaan Willems is a Lecturer of War in 20th Century Europe at Lancaster University. He has studied in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Russia, and has conducted research in Germany, Israel, Poland, Russia, and the United Kingdom. He completed his MSc "Second World War in Europe" (2012) and PhD in History (2017) at the University of Edinburgh. 

Dr. Willems has published in English, German, and Russian peer-reviewed journals, including the The Journal of Slavic Military Studies and the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, and is Associate Editor of The Journal of Slavic Military Studies.
His first monograph “Violence in Defeat: The Wehrmacht on German Soil, 1944-1945,” was published with Cambridge University Press in February 2021. The work is a study into the impact and behaviour of the Wehrmacht on its own territory during the last year of the war, and focuses on the German units fighting in East Prussia and its capital Königsberg.
He recently published A Transnational History of Forced Migrants in Europe: Unwilling Nomads in the Age of Two World Wars (Bloomsbury, 2022), co-edited with Dr Michal Adam Palacz, which examines forced migration in the first half of the Twentieth Century.