Dr. Beorn's first book, Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus, explored the local participation of the German Army in the Holocaust, It looked at a series of case studies of units in the Generalbezirk Weißruthenien during World War II. It argued for a progression of ever-increasing complicity by the Wehrmacht in genocide. His second book, The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution, is a general survey of the Holocaust in the East. His third book is on the Janowska concentration camp. Between the Wires: The Janowska Camp and the Holocaust in Lviv will be released from Nebraska University Press in 2024.
Digital Humanities Work
Beorn is a founding member of the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative, an interdisciplinary group of scholars interested in exploring how a spatial and digital approach can better inform our understanding of the Holocaust.[3] He is a digital humanist who integrates mapping, modeling, and social network analyses into his work. His current project isVisualizing Janowska: Creating a Digital Architectural Model of a Nazi Concentration Camp.
Awards and Fellowships
AHRC Research, Development, and Engagement Fellowship, 2023
National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant "Collaborative Research - Holocaust Historical GIS," Award # 0820501 (with Tim Cole, Simone Gigliotti, Alberto Giordano, Anna Holian, Paul Jaskot, Anne Knowles, Marc Masurovsky, and Erik Steiner), 2008-2011[8]
Beorn, Waitman Wade. "Understanding the Holocaust in the Context of the Second World War." In Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust, edited by Laura Hilton and Avinoam Patt. Madison WI: Wisconsin University Press, 2020.
Beorn, Waitman Wade. "All the Other Neighbors: Communal Genocide in Eastern Europe." In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Holocaust, edited by Hilary Earl and Simone Gigliotti, 153–72. Hoboken, MJ: Wiley and Sons, 2020.
Beorn, Waitman Wade. "Unraveling Janowska: Excavating an Understudied Camp through Spatial Testimonies." In Beyond "Ordinary Men": Christopher R. Browning and Holocaust Historiography edited by Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, Jürgen Matthäus and Mark W. Hornburg, 250–68. Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019.
Beorn, Waitman Wade. "Killing on the Ground and in the Mind: The Spatialities of Genocide in the East." In Geographies of the Holocaust, edited by Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano, 89–118. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014.
^Mezger, Caroline (2018). "The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution". German History. 36 (4): 664–666. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghy069.
^Pastushenko, Tetiana (2019). "Waitman Wade Beorn, The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution". European History Quarterly. 49 (2): 305–307. doi:10.1177/0265691419839585b.