Biography

Mikkel Dack is a historian of modern Europe with a particular interest in Germany during the era of the World Wars and the years immediately after 1945. He earned his M.A. at the University of Waterloo and Ph.D. at the University of Calgary and has also studied at the Freie Universität Berlin and Helmut Schmidt Universität in Hamburg.

Dack’s research engages with political and cultural history and the study of violence, political extremism, and social memory. His book, Everyday Denazification in Postwar Germany: The Fragebogen and Political Screening During the Allied Occupation, appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2023, and explores the material and emotional consequences of denazification for ordinary German citizens and Allied efforts to simultaneously punish and reorient former Nazis. He has also written research articles on post-traumatic stress amongst perpetrators, political denunciation, wartime sexual violence, and eugenics legislation. He is currently involved in a number of research projects related to combating violent extremism in Europe and the United States, including a global history of anti-fascism campaigns in postwar Germany, Austria, Italy, and Japan.

Dack’s scholarship has been awarded grants and fellowships from an array of sources, including the German Historical Institute, German Research Foundation, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), French National Research Agency, Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.​

In addition to his faculty position, Dack serves as Director of Research for the Rowan Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights.

Publications

Everyday Denazification in Postwar Germany: The Fragebogen and Political Screening During the Allied Occupation (Cambridge University Press, 2023). 

“Police Radicalization: An International Perspective,” in Extremism in Policing: A Reference Handbook, eds. Carla Lewandowski and Jeff Bumgarner (ABC-Clio, forthcoming, 2024).

(with Jennifer Rich) “The Holocaust in Virtual Reality: Ethics and Possibilities,” The Journal of Holocaust Research 36:2-3 (2022): 201-11.

“Tailoring Truth: Political Amnesia, Memory Construction, and Whitewashing the Nazi Past from Below,” German Politics and Society 39:1 (Spring 2021).

“The Alberta Eugenics Movement and the 1937 Amendment to the Sexual Sterilization Act,” in Psychiatry and the Legacies of Eugenics: Historical Studies of Alberta and Beyond, eds. Frank W. Stahnisch and Erna Kerbegovic (Athabasca University Press, 2020).

“A Comparative Study of French Denazification: Instruments and Procedures in Allied Occupied Germany,” in La France et la dénazification de l’Allemagne après 1945, eds. Sébastien Chauffour et al (Peter Lang, 2019): 109-27.

“Die Entnazifizierung einer „Tätergesellschaft“: Bestrafung und Reintegration im besetzten Deutschland und Österreich,” in NS-Täterinnen und –Täter in der Nachkriegzeit (KZ-Gedenkstätte Mauthausen, 2017).

“Propagating Victimhood: The Fragebogen, Denazification, and Trauma in Postwar Germany,” in Traumatic Memories of the Second World War and After, eds. Peter Leese and Jason Crouthamel (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 

“The Alberta Eugenics Movement and the 1937 Amendment to the Sexual Sterilization Act,” Past Imperfect 17 (2011): 90-113.