Goethe University in Frankfurt has announced plans to establish a long-term professorship dedicated to the study of the Holocaust.
The new chair will represent Germany's "first long-term professorship with a specific focus on the repercussions that have followed the Holocaust through to the present day," the Deutsche Welle broadcasting company reported.
The university expects to launch the professorship in 2017, with a search already underway for a candidate will will also serve as the head of Frankfurt's Fritz-Bauer Institute, which studies the history and impact of the Holocaust.
Goethe University spokesman Olaf Kaltenborn told Deutsche Welle that the inauguration of the chair - the first of its kind in Germany - marks "a milestone in German Holocaust research."
Goethe University Vice President Prof. Manfred Schubert-Zsilavecz agreed, stating that the new chair "gives us the important impetus to better understand discrimination and oppression in the world by looking at the structure of the domination of Nazi control during the war."
According to Schubert-Zsilavecz, Goethe University is the ideal spot for the new professorship, given that the university was established in 1914 by mainly Jewish founders.
The announcement of the professorship also comes the same year the world marks 70 years since the conclusion of World War II.