José Gotovitch (°1940) graduated in history from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) where he later taught contemporary history for many years. He joined the Centre for Historical Research and Studies of the Second World War (institutional ancestor of CegeSoma) in 1967. In 1971 he published, in collaboration with Jules Gérard-Libois,  'L'an 40. La Belgique occupée', a pioneer book on the German occupation of Belgium in 1940. He made a major contribution to the development of Ceges’ collections of  archives and authored various of its archival inventories. He also collected vast numbers of interviews currently conserved at  CegeSoma. He also authored numerous articles on the history and historiography of World War 2, the engagement of intellectuals, the Spanish Civil War and the challenges of memory. In 2008, he co-edited with Paul Aron a dictionary of WW2 in Belgium, published by André Versaille.
He became Director of the Centre in 1988. He was also Scientific Director of the Centre for Communist Archives in Belgium (CArCoB). His research centers on the history of WW2 and of communism in Belgium, mainly from a social and prosopographic point of view. In 1988, he defended a doctoral thesis on Belgian communists in 1939-1944, later published as a book ('Du rouge au tricolore. Les communistes belges de 1939 à 1944. Un aspect de l’histoire de la Résistance en Belgique’). In 1992, he created within the Institute of Sociology of the ULB a study group on the history and sociology of communism (‘Groupe d’Histoire et de Sociologie du Communisme’) which later  became the ‘Centre d’Histoire et de Sociologie des Gauches’. In 1994-1995, he held the Francqui Chair at the Facultés universitaires Notre Dame de la Paix in Namur. He received the "De Stassart" prize for national history (1992-1997) of the Royal Academy of Belgium and was elected to the Academy’s Class of Letters in 2004.
In 2005, he left CegeSoma, of which he was director for 17 years.