Okkupation im Osten: Besatzeralltag in Warschau und Minsk 1939-1944 [Occupation in the East: The Occupiers' Everyday Life in Warsaw and Minsk, 1939-1944] (review)

During World War II, Nazi Germany occupied for a couple of years huge territories in Eastern Europe: from the Baltic republics up to the suburbs of Leningrad and from there to the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains and back westwards to Ukraine and the Balkans. The civilian and military regimes established there have been researched in the postwar period for single regions and places, among them Warsaw. In a thesis from 2008 at Munich's University, Stephan Lehnstaedt studied once more the situation in the biggest metropolis conquered by the Wehrmacht in Eastern Europe. In addition, he frequently compares the Nazi occupation regime in Poland to the conditions in Belarus' capital Minsk.

The author focuses on two questions: in which way did the occupiers manage to live their daily life in a hostile environment, and how did this situation bear upon their exercise of power towards the local inhabitants—which happened to be extremely violent.

The author chose the most populous cities in the Generalgouvernement (GG) and in the so-called Generalkommissariat Weißruthenien because there "were relatively many Germans around" and sources are abundant (p. 20). The study is based on substantial materials in the Bundesarchiv, the Russian State Military archive (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv) and Warsaw's central and regional archives, among them the files of the Sondergericht Warschau (Warsaw special court). Furthermore, Lehnstaedt analyzed several contemporary German-language periodicals and official publications as well as some sources and research literature in Polish. He did not consult archives in Belarus or even sources or literature in Russian or Belarusian.

Lehnstaedt starts by presenting the most important institutional or collective players of Nazi occupation policy: the Wehrmacht, SS and police, the administrative organs and the civilian population, i.e., those arrived from the Reich who filled the top echelons (Reichsdeutsche) and the so-called Volksdeutschen who joined the new masters by claiming German descent and were rewarded by (mostly) subordinate functions. There follows a section on the German quarters which were established in parts of the cities boasting representative buildings with a higher comfort of living and thus usable as housing space for the pretended master race (Herrenmenschen). The second main chapter deals with the standardized everyday life which was by far more militarized and—even during leisure—informed by compulsory collective gatherings than in Germany itself. In the third chapter the author dwells on the "distance from the standard": the occupiers' stereotype of the "unloved East," the everyday delinquency in their dealings with the locals (robbing, bribery, black market businesses), the common alcohol abuse, and the numerous cases where individuals came into conflict with the judiciary. Whereas the Germans of the occupation apparatus were called upon to practice solidarity and comradeship among them, their relation to the local Poles and Jews, in Warsaw, were characterized by distrust, arrogance, and hostility. The author addresses the "master race's" habitus in the fourth main chapter. According to the Nazi rules, Germans had to be mindful not to harm the "reputation of Germandom (Deutschtum)" in the public sphere. At this point, Lehnstaedt also includes the perspective of the occupied. At an early stage, the Germans' terror and acts of violence engendered hate among the Polish and Belarusian populations. In Minsk, this led to counterforce by resistance groups already in 1941, culminating in a successful attempt on the life of Generalkommissar Wilhelm Kube in September 1943. In Warsaw, only in 1943 did the occupiers come to be rattled by a rising number of resistance operations, including assassination attempts at some of their high ranking representatives. The relationship between the occupiers and the locals is dealt with in the fifth main chapter on "Everyday life and violence." Taking reprisals, the Germans claimed more victims every time, while...