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  • Okkupation im Osten: Besatzeralltag in Warschau und Minsk 1939-1944
  • Catherine Epstein
Okkupation im Osten: Besatzeralltag in Warschau und Minsk 1939-1944, Stephan Lehnstaedt (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2010), 381 pp., cloth, €54.80.

What was it like to be part of the German occupation of the Nazi East? How did German occupiers think of themselves and their task? Why did they participate in the murder of so many native inhabitants? In this intriguing study, Stephan Lehnstaedt describes the views and circumstances of roughly 85,000 Reich German and Volksdeutsche (ethnic German) occupation personnel in Warsaw and Minsk. These numbers include approximately 30,000 administrative and security officials in Warsaw (along with a few private individuals), 10,000 similar officials in Minsk, 40,000 Wehrmacht soldiers in Warsaw, and 5,000 soldiers in Minsk (p. 33). Lehnstaedt reconstructs the world in which the German occupiers worked, played, and fantasized. In the process, he makes an argument that the Nazis forged an "occupation society" that sanctioned extreme violence against Jews, Poles, and Belorussians.

Lehnstaedt works with three main concepts: "the norms of everyday life" (normierter Alltag), "realization of one's self" (Alf Lüdtke's Eigensinn), and Habitus (Pierre Bourdieu's notion of socially learned dispositions). Most German officials in the East found themselves there by chance, not by choice. They made [End Page 133] up a cross-section of the German population, although women, children, and the elderly were underrepresented. German officials' experiences in the East, and not prior ideological fervor or other personal proclivities, shaped their views. In the East, they operated in an "us-versus-them" environment. In the workplace, there was a strict separation of Germans from others. In Warsaw, occupation officials lived in a particular neighborhood. In both Warsaw and Minsk, Germans shared close living quarters with other occupation officials (their families rarely accompanied them to the East). In addition, their free time was highly structured: organized sports, cultural events, and frequent celebrations left them little time to pursue their own interests. The Nazis did, though, allow expressions of individuality: they looked the other way when Germans engaged in drinking sprees or went to church. Occupation officials thus had outlets for individual strivings—they could pursue Eigensinn in this situation of enforced togetherness (p. 195).

A small, beleaguered group living among a hostile population, occupation officials depended on each other for everything from security to entertainment. This, Lehnstaedt argues, created a Habitus in which certain norms became second nature. Germans in the East shared a strong sense of community and comradeship. They believed in the rightness of the Nazi cause and never questioned German racial supremacy. They internalized Nazi propaganda about the "dirtiness" of Jews and the "threat" they posed to Western civilization. Similarly, they did not question that Polish and Belorussian resistance fighters were engaged in "banditry." They also insisted on maintaining a façade of German unity to the native population. They were unwilling to accuse or condemn their peers; any such denunciation could lead to their own jettisoning from the much-needed community. Their situation, they believed, justified the violence that they and their colleagues practiced.

Lehnstaedt pushes his argument even further: he suggests that occupation personnel shared a fascination with violence that further bound their society together. As he emphasizes, German occupiers knew a great deal about the Holocaust. Soldiers traveling through Poland openly talked about the murder of Jews. Occupation officials eagerly engaged in "ghetto tourism." During the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, they went to their roofs to view the brutal destruction of the once teeming ghetto. They also benefitted from goods confiscated from Jews. In Minsk, a woman needing gold for dental work turned to the local headquarters of the security police and SD; three wedding rings taken from Jews soon found a new home in her mouth (p. 317). Although occupation officials openly discussed the ongoing violence among themselves, they maintained silence about their actions when among outsiders; this conspiracy of silence persisted well into the postwar years. For Lehnstaedt, violence constituted the core of occupation society.

How convincing is all of this? Lehnstaedt worked hard to uncover sources written by occupation personnel. Unfortunately, only a limited number of...

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