Grzegorz Berendt

Grzegorz Berendt (born 1964) is a Polish historian. He is a professor at the University of Gdańsk and affiliated with the Institute of National Remembrance. Berendt was the director of the Museum of the Second World War from 2022 to 2024.

Career Berendt is an associate professor at the University of Gdańsk in the Department of History of Culture of Political Thought; his research focuses on the history of Polish Jews and other ethnic groups in Pomerania in the twentieth century. He also serves as the Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Jewish Historical Institute. In June 2021, he was appointed as the acting director; a year later, he was appointed a full director for a seven-year term. The same month, he was appointed chairman of the International Council of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

IPN Berendt has been associated with the Institute of National Remembrance since 2006, including stints as the head of the Public Education Branch and as the head of the Department of Historical Research in the Gdańsk office.

Views and reception Polish culpability in the Holocaust Berendt has clashed with other historians about the question of Polish culpability in the Holocaust. In 2017, Jan Grabowski, writing in Haaretz, responded to a piece critiquing him that Berendt had published in Haaretz the previous month. Grabowski stated that Berendt believed the Blue Police to have persecuted the Jews only at the behest of their German masters without exercising any significant agency; Grabowski found Berendt's assertions ahistorical, and vice versa. Adam Leszczyński notes that within the IPN, Berendt is considered one of those most keen to downplay the extent of Poles' complicity in the Holocaust;