Lecture | Vlasta Kordová: The Fight against the ‘Objective Enemies’ of the Third Reich. The Transformation of the Police into a Central Instrument of the Totalitarian State and Genocide

Date: Monday 26 October 2026, 6 PM

Venue: OVK ŽMP, Maiselova 15, 110 00 Prague 1

The lecture examines the transformation of Nazi law and police practice into an instrument for the pre-emptive suppression of the ‘objective enemies’ of the Third Reich. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s concepts, it examines how the Nazi conception of security, based on the protection of the Volksgemeinschaft, made it possible to persecute both individuals and entire groups not on the basis of their actual actions, but on their position within the Nazi worldview. Using examples from the rear of the Eastern Front and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, she analyses how the construction of Jews as a security threat linked preventive police thinking to genocidal practices.

Vlasta Kordová is a historian whose research focuses on Nazi security policy and the repressive apparatus, the Second World War, occupation policy and resistance movements.

She is currently a research assistant at the Institute of Eastern European History at the University of Vienna. In her postdoctoral project ‘From Ghettos to Gated Communities?’, she examines the long-term transformations of urban space, property relations and social exclusion in Brno and Ostrava, from the Nazi occupation through the period of state socialism to the post-1989 era.