Genesis des Genozids: Polen 1939–1941 (review)

Did the German invasion of Poland mark the beginning of the Nazi war of elimination (Vernichtungskrieg) in Eastern Europe? The authors of these twelve uniformly excellent essays answer with a resounding "yes." Their view stands in stark contrast to the longstanding perception that the Nazi genocidal war began only with the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. To counter this reading, the editors of this volume organized a conference titled "The Incubation Period of the War of Elimination: Poland 1939-1941." Held in September 2003, the conference was co-sponsored by the German Historical Institute in Warsaw and the Research Center Ludwigsburg at the University of Stuttgart. As the editors note, previous scholarly focus on Operation Barbarossa downplayed the atrocities committed in Poland and "rightly led to bewilderment" among Polish scholars (p. 7). After all, Poland sustained proportionally more deaths and damage to infrastructure than any other country in World War II. From a variety of angles, the authors of the essays show how events in Poland between 1939 and 1941 initiated, generated, or foreshadowed the full-scale genocidal war that followed the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

A number of the essays focus on how various institutions first practiced liquidation methods in Poland. Jochen Bö hler, for example, shows that Wehrmacht soldiers, long subject to anti-Polish and anti-Jewish indoctrination, engaged in numerous atrocities against Jews, alleged Polish partisans, and both Christian and Jewish Polish prisoners of war. Dorothee Weitbrecht argues that Poland—not the Soviet Union—was the first operational area for the notorious Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei) and Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst). With the goal of eliminating the Polish elite—the standard-bearers of the Polish nation—the Einsatzgruppen murdered many thousands of Poles before these units were disbanded in late November 1939. Klaus-Michael Mallmann analyzes the role of the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei) in the ambitious Germanization program for western Poland, which involved brutally deporting hundreds of thousands of Poles to make way for ethnic German resettlement. Martin Cüppers discusses the participation of Waffen-SS units in ghettoizing Jews, rounding them up for forced labor, and deporting them between 1939 and 1941. Volker Rieß describes the killing of German, Polish, and Jewish psychiatric patients. In the fall and winter of 1939-40, western Poland (along with neighboring Pomerania) became the site of the first such murders in the Third Reich. Moreover, these killings took place not on orders from Berlin, but on the initiative of regional Nazi leaders. Rieß thus demonstrates that developments in occupied Poland radicalized the Nazi racial project. Finally, Michael Alberti examines the many strands of terror deployed in the Warthegau to show how that region became a "laboratory" of Nazi racial policies (p. 113).

Between 1939 and 1941, Poland was subjected to not one, but two brutal occupations. Several of the essays explore the terror unleashed by the Soviets in their occupation of eastern Poland. In separate essays, Bogdan Musial, Jacek Andrzej Młynarczyk, and Marek Wierzbicki show how Soviet officials manipulated ethnic tensions to achieve the socio-political goal of Sovietization. Polish elites were thus eliminated, while Belorussians, Ukrainians, and—sometimes—Jews were promoted in their place. Poles were arrested and murdered; hundreds of thousands were deported eastward. Musial, for example, describes three particularly brutal mass shootings: the execution of Polish officers at Katyń and elsewhere, the murder of prison inmates in spring 1940, and similar killings in the summer of 1941. He also makes the somewhat counterintuitive observation that "in carrying out atrocities, the Soviets in general proved themselves much more 'efficient' and better organized than the Germans" (p. 30). In contrast to many Nazi ethnic cleansing operations, Musial argues, the Soviet deportations and mass shootings were characterized by careful planning and execution.

Embedded in these essays are several contested issues in Holocaust research. One concerns the role of the Wehrmacht in the Holocaust. Böhler argues that soldiers mistreated and even murdered Jews and Poles during...