At the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen, he was involved in the development and documentation of subject-specific software, as well as in organising summer schools. In this context, he co-authored a study on the computer-assisted processing of inventories and another on the automated conversion of historical sources.
He subsequently served as the lead researcher in a collaborative project with the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum aimed at preserving and improving access to archival sources. This work resulted in various source editions, including a two-volume memorial book on the Sinti and Roma in Auschwitz-Birkenau, a five-volume documentation of the ‘Auschwitz Death Registers’, and an edition of perpetrator sources comprising the site and commandant’s orders of the Auschwitz concentration camp. This collaboration led to the establishment of a joint database project involving the State Museums of Majdanek, Stutthof and Groß-Rosen, which he oversaw. At the same time, he completed his doctoral thesis on the development of digital archives at Darmstadt Technical University.
Since 2001, Thomas Grotum has been a research assistant at the Chair of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Trier. In addition to his specialisation in 19th- and 20th-century history, he represents the field of ‘historical and cultural studies data processing’. From 2002 to 2012, he was an associate researcher on several projects within Collaborative Research Centre 600 (Alienation and Poverty) and the Forschungsclusters „Gesellschaftliche Abhängigkeiten und soziale Netzwerke“ at the Universities of Trier and Mainz.
Since 2012, Thomas Grotum has been leading a research project on the history of the Trier Gestapo, which is being conducted from April 2018 to June 2022 as the DFG-funded project “Gestapo: Nazi Terror on the Ground. The Trier State Police Station in the Southern Rhine Province’ (Grotum/Raphael). As a lecturer on a project seminar, he was involved in 2006 in compiling numerous victim biographies for the laying of Stolpersteine in Trier and, in recent years, has worked with students to develop a concept for age-appropriate teaching of the history of the Gestapo camp in Saarbrücken, which was implemented for the twelfth time in 2024 as part of the ‘Buddeln und Bilden’ work camp organised by the Landesjugendring Saar e.V.
Since October 2019, Thomas Grotum has been a member of the collegial management team of the newly founded SEAL Research and Documentation Centre (Structures and Memory. Applied History and Digital Teaching) within Faculty III at the University of Trier and serves as its managing director. Since 2019, Thomas Grotum has also provided academic support to the University of Trier’s Initiative for Interdisciplinary Research on Anti-Semitism (IIA).
Since 2020, Thomas Grotum has been a volunteer archivist at the Speyer State Archives. Since January 2021, he has also been an examiner at the Rhineland-Palatinate Police University. In 2023–24, he was commissioned by the Ministry for Family, Women, Culture and Integration (MFFKI) in Mainz to develop an operational concept for an International Research, Documentation, Education and Encounter Centre on ‘Reparations’ in Trier-Saarburg. Through interdisciplinary collaboration at the University of Trier (History, Computational Linguistics, Computer Science), the conceptual and technical foundations were laid for the KIZEQ project consortium (AI-supported infrastructure for eyewitness, memory and source research), of which he is a member.
