Research interests

Bastiaan Willems works on the history of the Second World War and the consequences of Germany’s violent transition from war to peace in 1945. He has a particular interest in the flight and expulsion of the population of Eastern Germany during the final year of the war and during the immediate post-war era.

He is currently working the project Communities of Violence: Public Execution in Germany 1945, which analyses the impact of German intra-ethnic violence on the German late-war society and on policies and discourse in the first years of the Federal Republic of Germany. The project started as a Leverhulme Abroad Fellowship at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and is continuing at Lancaster.