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  • Das "Grossdeutsche Reich" und die Juden: Nationalsozialistische Verfolgung in den "angegliederten" Gebieten ed. by Wolf Gruner and Jörg Osterloh
  • Waitman Beorn
Das "Grossdeutsche Reich" und die Juden: Nationalsozialistische Verfolgung in den "angegliederten" Gebieten. Edited by Wolf Gruner and Jörg Osterloh. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2010. Pp. 440. Paper €39.90. ISBN 978-3593391687.

In this volume, Wolf Grüner and Jörg Osterloh bring together twelve essays exploring the incorporation of neighboring regions into the "Greater German Reich" under the Nazis. These regions had lain outside the political boundaries of Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power, but were claimed as German territories based on historical arguments and ethnic composition. As a rule, scholars have not paid much attention to the ways in which the integration of these territories into the Third Reich affected the nature of the Holocaust. As Grüner writes, "the influence of territorial expansion . . . on the persecution of the Jews, that is, on the policies of the perpetrators, on the position of the respective Jewish population and on the relationships between all inhabitants, has hardly been systematically researched to date" (7). The authors in this collection aim to remedy this oversight by examining the development of Nazi anti-Jewish policy in the following regions: the Saar, Austria, the Sudetenland, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the Memel region, Danzig-West Prussia, the Wartheland, the District of Zeichenau, East Upper Silesia, Eupen-Malmedy, Luxemburg, and Alsace-Lorraine.

The chapters are arranged roughly chronologically by date of annexation, and each follows the same basic structure, beginning with the history of the region before annexation, followed by a section on events immediately after military occupation, and finishing with a discussion of events after official incorporation into Germany. This uniform structure allows readers to compare regions more readily. Each author wrestles with the same challenging but important issues: how did annexation affect the speed and extent of anti-Jewish policy? In what ways did these regions implement, lag behind, or surge ahead of existing German policy? What was the relationship between ethnic Germans living inside and outside the Reich?

The volume's common findings across regions demonstrate the larger significance of these more narrow studies. First, in almost every location, "foreign" Nazi parties relied greatly on the promise of a "return" to Germany to win political power. This message often overshadowed Nazi racial designs, at least initially. As one author writes, "The Nazi state understood itself as the representative of the Greater German Volksgemeinschaft and saw itself entitled to intervene in the life and policies of other states" (143). Each contribution also reveals the very real implications of annexation for the Jews living in these areas, with particular emphasis on the systematic plunder of Jewish property through official and unofficial channels. This is an area that has become increasingly important since the work of Martin Dean (Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933-1945 [New York, 2008]) [End Page 725] and Götz Aly (Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State [New York, 2007]).

One of the more intriguing commonalities among the regions was the flow of Nazi "experts," such as Adolf Eichmann and Josef Burckel, from one place to another. The latter was the head of the Nazi party in the Saar, then assisted in implementing the Anschluß of Austria, before becoming the Nazi governor of the Saar and Lorraine. The future commandant of the Treblinka death camp, Franz Stangl, was part of the apparatus that forced Jews to emigrate from Austria. These examples and others depict the annexed territories as laboratories for training experts in anti-Jewish policy, a characterization strongly supported by the overrepresentation of Germans from such border regions in Nazi organizations such as the SS.

This collection also demonstrates that "the key to the intensification and inconsistency of Jewish policy in the course of annexation . . . lies in the interplay between local, regional, and central measures of persecution" (11). In fact, the explication of evolutionary differences in anti-Jewish policy on the ground is one of the volume's most significant contributions to the scholarship. Besides highlighting the obvious social and demographic differences...

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