Born in communist Poland in 1960, Bogdan Musial worked as a coal miner and participated in the anti-communist Solidarity movement before fleeing to Germany in 1985. He went on to study history in Hanover and Manchester, earning his doctorate in 1998 with a thesis on the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland. He then became a professor at Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw from 2010 to 2015, and has published numerous works on the Holocaust, as well as on German, Soviet and Polish history.