[End Page 714] ABOUT THE EDITORS
Geoffrey Megargee was Senior Applied Research Scholar in the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he served since 2000 as project director and editor in chief for the museum’s seven-volume Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945. The first volume of that work, for which he served as volume editor, appeared in May 2009 and received a National Jewish Book Award and a Judaica Reference Award, among other distinctions. Dr. Megargee received his doctorate in military history in 1998 from the Ohio State University. He was the recipient of, among other honors, a J. William Fulbright grant for research in Germany, on which he based his book Inside Hitler’s High Command (winner of the Society for Military History’s 2001 Distinguished Book Award). He is also author of War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941, and a contributor to the West Point History of Warfare. Dr. Megargee was a member of the Department of the Army Historical Advisory Subcommittee and a Trustee for the Society for Military History; he served as Treasurer of the United States Commission on Military History and Presidential Counselor for the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. He lectured frequently on the German army in World War II and the Holocaust. Dr. Megargee passed away in 2020.
Rüdiger Overmans lives in Freiburg, Germany. He holds doctorates in economics and history. He is a retired member of the former Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamtes der Bundeswehr (Military History Research Institute of the Federal Armed Forces); nowadays it resides in Potsdam, near Berlin, under the designation Zentrum für Militärgeschichte und Sozialwissenschaft der Bundeswehr (Center for Military History and Social Sciences).
Beginning in 1987, he took part in the book project Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg (published in English as Germany and the Second World War), a multivolume series on many aspects of World War II. Since his retirement in 2004, Dr. Overmans works as a freelance historian, consultant, and reviewer. His fields of interest are mainly the expulsion of Germans from their settlement areas after World War II, the human losses caused by wars, and the prisoners of war. His first major publication as a historian was Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg (German Military Losses in the Second World War), which was published in 1996. Other major pieces include chapters on the fate of the POWs in Germany (volume 9/2 of Germany and the Second World War, 2005) and the fate of the German POWs in Allied hands as well (volume 10/2, 2008). He has published several collaborative works, and together with Wolfgang Vogt und Reinhard Otto he is working to complete an encyclopedia of the German POW administration system in World War II.
Wolfgang Vogt lives in Koblenz, Germany. He retired as an officer in the Bundeswehr in 2006. Since 1986, he has been studying the topic of German prisoner of war policy in World War II. At the center of that work is the creation of a private archive of camp records as well as the analysis of relevant prisoner of war correspondence (at present consisting of approximately 26,000 pieces). Since 1988, he has been the chairman of the international Arbeitsgemeinschaft Zensurpost e.V. (Study Group for Censored Mail) and editor of their publications. Together with Dr. Gianfranco Mattiello of Italy, Mr. Vogt is author of the two-volume handbook, Deutsche Kriegsgefangenen- und Internierten-Einrichtungen 1939–45 (German Prisoner of War and Internee Facilities 1939–45). As a freelance historian, Vogt’s areas of concentration lie in providing factual advice to authors and official or unofficial organizations, including archives, on German prisoner of war policy as well as authoring expert reports. Such activity includes providing testimony in court (e.g., 1994, legal proceedings in the Hamburg superior district court regarding the authenticity of the Diary of Anne Frank). Together with Rüdiger Overmans and Reinhard Otto, he is working to complete an encyclopedia of the German POW administration system in World War II.
