Bogdan Musiał (born 1960 in Poland) is a Polish-German historian. In 1985 he left Poland and became a political refugee in Germany, where he obtained German citizenship. In 2010 he returned to Poland and became a professor at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw. Musiał specializes in World War II history. Career Bogdan Musiał was born in 1960 in Wielopole, Dąbrowa County, Poland. He worked in Silesian mines and worked with the Polish Solidarność movement. On account of the latter involvement, he was persecuted by state security and in 1985 sought and received political asylum in the Federal Republic of Germany; in 1992 he was naturalized. He worked as a mechanic, and from 1990 to 1998 studied history, political science and sociology at the Leibniz University of Hannover and the University of Manchester. In 1998 he graduated with a thesis on the treatment of Jews in occupied Poland. From 1991 to 1998, Musiał received a scholarship from Friedrich Ebert Foundation. During that time he was one of the main critics of the Wehrmachtsausstellung exhibition compiled by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, which eventually had to be seriously revised before reopening to conform with his findings. Since 1998 he served as scientific researcher at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw where he has studied previously inaccessible sources about crimes of the Soviet NKVD, during the Soviet retreat in 1941 which escalated violence. He habilitated in 2005. In 2008 he published the book Kampfplatz Deutschland. 2010-2015 he lived in Poland and worked at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw. Lustration activities In 2007 Musiał wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that Zygmunt Bauman was a former agent for Poland's Urzad Bezpieczenstwa (communist secret police) between 1945 and 1953 and had participated in political cleansing of opponents. Bauman responded that he would not dignify Musiał with an answer as "I don't want to give weight or importance to something which is [composed of] half-truths and 100% lies. What is true in his article is not new, because everybody knew I was a communist." Prior research by Piotr Gontarczyk showed that Bauman had indeed been a political officer and a secret informant of the communist authorities and had received awards from the communist government for fighting Polish democratic and independence movements. In 2008 Musiał published a controversial article in Rzeczpospolita alleging that the father of Polish historian Włodzimierz Borodziej—who had advocated