Born in communist Poland in 1960, Bogdan Musial worked as a coal miner and took part in the anti-communist Solidarity movement before fleeing to Germany in 1985. In the West, he studied history in Hanover and Manchester, earning his doctorate with a thesis on the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland (1998), becoming a professor at Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw (2010-2015). He has published numerous works on the Holocaust and German, Soviet and Polish history.