Epstein , Catherine Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland (review)
2019; Maney Publishing; Volume: 97; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/see.2019.0093
ISSN2222-4327
Autores Tópico(s)Eastern European Communism and Reforms
ResumoSEER, 97, 2, APRIL 2019 382 not constitute a substantial body of work capable of detailed scrutiny. Etkind concludes with two counterfactuals: if Wilson had not fallen ill, if Roosevelt had listened to Bullitt in the late 1930s, how much better the world would have been. He also argues for Bullitt’s positive impact: Kennan’s later influence on US Cold War policies arose substantially out of Bullitt’s influence; and he suggests that Jean Monnet ‘followed Bullitt when he brought the European Union into existence’ (p. 240). Such attenuated claims hardly persuade. Department of History Michael F. Hopkins University of Liverpool Epstein, Catherine. Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland. Oxford Studies in Modern European History. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2010. xv + 451 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £30.00. On 8 October 1939 Adolf Hitler decreed the annexation of areas of western Poland and the Free City of Danzig. Some were attached to the already existing Gaue (provinces) of East Prussia and Silesia (later Upper Silesia). Two new Gaue were constituted, Danzig-West Prussia and the Wartheland, established solely from annexed territory. Initially known as Reichsgau Posen, it was renamed Reichsgau Wartheland (Warthegau) on 29 January 1940, under the leadership of a key active Nazi leader, Arthur Greiser, Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter from 21 and 26 October 1939 respectively. In this authoritatively sourced and minutely examined study of Greiser, formerly President of the Free City of Danzig, and his ruthless management of the Warthegau in the service of the wartime Third Reich, the author aims to rectify what she sees ‘as the neglected story of an important Nazi leader and his brutal Germanization programme in occupied Poland’ (p. 2). That programme was intended to rectify the population makeup of the area in favour of Germans — a paltry 309,000 to begin with, but to be expanded by the forced influx of ethnic Germans from the Old Reich and the Baltic States — as against the resident 322,000 Jews and over three and a half million Poles who needed to be got rid of to make space for the incomers. The vital question was: how could that aim be achieved within the exigencies of wartime Eastern Europe? Given that the Warthegau became notorious for the deliberate mass murder of many thousands of Jews and Poles (the latter, towards whom Greiser adopted ‘vengeful policies’ in accordance with Hitler’s comments to him on 28 September1939,p.129),Epsteinrelatesheraccounttothewiderhistoricaldebate REVIEWS 383 about Nazi genocide and its initiators. Contrary to some interpretations, she argues that attention should be paid to the role of individuals such as Greiser as against the emphasis upon ‘situational’ factors being prime determinants (p. 5). Yet in presenting her ‘integrated [demographic] history of Greiser’s Germanisation programme’ Epstein strikes a completely false note with her ahistorical comment, ‘examining the Holocaust in the context of a more general Germanisation programme may strike some readers as controversial or even loathsome’ (p. 11). Contrariwise, German historian Ulrich Herbert more correctly stated that ‘the process of the mass murder of millions of people […] was not an aberration in the overall administration of the occupation but was a component of German occupation in the East’ (National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies, ed. Ulrich Herbert, New York and Oxford, 2000, p. 32). It could not be otherwise since events elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe and the policy indicators and orders from Berlin guided, if not dictated, policies at local levels in the Warthegau as well. Hitler himself provided such frameworks from 17 October 1939 when he declared that the new Reich territories would witness a hard racial struggle and be purged — i.e. ‘emptied’ — of Jews and Polacks. That followed his appointment on 7 October 1939 of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler as Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of Germandom, a commission the RFSS pursued with great energy. Nevertheless, desired Nazi ethnographic policies in the Warthegau could not be achieved because interim ‘solutions’ of mass deportations and resettlement for Jews and Poles outside the Gau was not matched by the incoming numbers of Volksdeutsche. Within the Reich’s wider mass murder actions of Jews...
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