Michael Fleming (historian)


Michael Fleming is a British historian and professor at the Polish University Abroad in London.
Fleming is the author of National Minorities in Post-Communist Poland ; Communism, Nationalism and Ethnicity in Poland, 1944–1950 ; and Auschwitz, the Allies and Censorship of the Holocaust. His articles have appeared in numerous journals, including American Jewish History, Modern Judaism, and Journal for the Study of Antisemitism. As of 2018 he is one of the conference secretaries of the Institute for Polish–Jewish Studies.

Education and career

Fleming graduated from the University of London and obtained his PhD from the University of Oxford. He has held teaching positions at Jesus College, Oxford, Pembroke College, Oxford, and the Academy of Humanities and Economics, Łódź. He was a visiting researcher in Warsaw at the Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences, and in Pułtusk at the Pułtusk Academy of Humanities.

Holocaust research

In Auschwitz, the Allies and Censorship of the Holocaust, Fleming seeks to show that the Allies knew in 1942 what was happening inside the German extermination camps. The Vrba-Wetzler report, written by two escapees from the Auschwitz concentration camp and distributed from April 1944, was not "the watershed moment", writes Norman J. W. Goda in a review of Fleming's book, in Allied knowledge of what was happening to the Jews inside Auschwitz, as is generally believed. The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs described the book as "undoubtedly one of the most important in the study of the Holocaust in the last twenty years".

Awards

Fleming shared the Aquila Polonica Prize in 2011.

Selected works

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