Dieter Pohl

Pohl served as an expert witness during the 2009 trial of John Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Sobibor extermination camp. Pohl testified that Sobibor was a death camp, the sole purpose of which was the killing of Jews, and that all Trawniki men had been generalists involved in guarding the prisoners as well as other duties. Therefore, if Demjanjuk was a Trawniki man at Sobibor, he had necessarily been involved in sending the prisoners to their deaths and was an accessory to murder. Pohl's testimony, along with that of other historians', proved decisive in securing a conviction.

Dieter Pohl studied history and political science at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich from 1984 to 1990, graduating with a Masters of Arts. Under the direction of Hans Günter Hockerts [de], he completed his PhD dissertation Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941–1944 ("Nazi persecution of Jews in Eastern Galicia 1941-1944") in 1995. From 1995 to August 2010, Pohl was a researcher, and then a department head, at the Munich Institute for Contemporary History. Since September 2010, Pohl has served a professor of contemporary history at the Historical Institute at the University of Klagenfurt, with a focus on Eastern and Southeastern Europe. His main research interests include the history of the Soviet Union; the Second World War in Europe and Asia; the history of communist systems after 1945; mass violence in the 20th century; Nazi occupations and violent crimes; and the contemporary history of Poland and Ukraine.

Dieter Pohl (born 1964) is a German historian and author who specialises in the Eastern European history and the history of mass violence in the 20th century.