Abstract
Catherine Epstein, Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010; xiv + 451 pp.; US$45.00 hbk, ISBN 9780199546411.
Following Poland’s defeat in 1939, part of the conquered territories under German occupation went to constitute the so-called General Government, while the territories of western Poland were annexed to the Reich. Distinctive administrative structures in the annexed territories enhanced the power of the regional bosses or Reichsstatthalter, who were directly responsible to Hitler. Each Reichsstatthalter interpreted in a different way Hitler’s mandate to ‘Germanize’ their respective territories; it was, however, Arthur Greiser as Reichsstatthalter and Gauleiter of the ‘Reichsgau Wartheland’ who stood out for his particularly radical policies. Not only was it Greiser who initiated the first mass gassings of Jews, at Chełmno in December 1941; Greiser was also distinctive among Nazi leaders for the brutality of his anti-Polish policies. While Greiser’s significance has been acknowledged in historical work on occupied Poland and the history of the Holocaust, Catherine Epstein’s outstanding biography provides for the first time a full assessment of his personality and his role in the drive to turn the Warthegau into a ‘German homeland’. Evoking in her title the trope of the Warthegau as a laboratory and a template, Epstein invites readers to consider how far Greiser and his Gau were indeed ‘models’, and how far developments in the Warthegau were also symptomatic of wider trends.
Epstein has done a remarkable job excavating Greiser’s life. Her sources include family photographs and personal letters, mainly from his military service in the First World War and the time of his divorce and remarriage in 1934–5. She portrays his modest middle-class family background, his schooldays in the then Prussian province of Posen, his wartime naval service, his mixed fortunes as a businessman in the Free City of Danzig, his time as a Freemason – which would later cause him trouble in internal investigations – and his decisive turn to politics in 1929, when he joined the Danzig NSDAP and quickly became a leading light in the local Party. By then his business had gone under: in the early 1930s Greiser was reduced to driving a tourist motorboat (which he had bought with money borrowed from his Jewish brother-in-law) around Danzig harbour. While Epstein finds little direct evidence of the young Greiser being aggressively anti-Polish, his background in pre-war Posen and postwar Danzig can plausibly be seen as influencing his emergence as a ‘borderland fascist’ whose primary animus was against the Poles.
Epstein convincingly argues that Danzig politics in the 1930s made Greiser all the more determined to wield power unfettered once the opportunity arose. As second-in-command to Gauleiter Albert Forster, he was hemmed in by a younger rival who positioned himself as more radical; as Senate President, Greiser was compelled to uphold Danzig’s status as a Free City through negotiations with League of Nations officials. Becoming redundant in Danzig when Germany attacked Poland and annexed the former Free City to the Reich, Greiser quickly secured appointment from Hitler as the Gauleiter of the new Reichsgau Posen (renamed Wartheland in January 1940). In spite of this sign of Hitler’s favour, Greiser’s relationship with Hitler never became close, and Hitler never visited the Warthegau. Casting around for allies, Greiser settled on Himmler, and he soon became – for all their disagreements on issues of ‘race’ and Germanness – Himmler’s favoured Gauleiter in the occupied East.
The mandate to Germanize his Gau by any and all means, with unlimited police powers available to back up his measures, offered a dizzying prospect. In 1939, the territory’s population consisted of nearly 4.2 million non-Jewish Poles, around 400,000 Polish Jews and an estimated 325,000 Germans. Expelling non-Germans was an obvious way to change this population composition, while enabling assets to be seized for the benefit of the incoming ethnic German resettlers, who were channelled by Greiser predominantly towards his Gau. But constraints on mass expulsions also became apparent, including the need to maintain production within the Gau, the logistics of removal and question of where to send the deportees. At the same time, Greiser sought to restrict the practice widely deployed in Albert Forster’s Reichsgau Danzig-Westpreußen of turning Poles into Germans through administrative fiat. While these conundrums of population policy in the Warthegau are well-established, Epstein succeeds in weaving together a nuanced and integrated account of Germanization showing the connections and contradictions between the policies of defining and segregating the resident ethnic Germans, the policies of expelling, displacing, exploiting and subjugating Poles, and policies towards the Jews, in which exploitation of their labour in a vast network of camps as well as in the Litzmannstadt ghetto was accompanied from December 1941 by the systematic murder of ‘unproductive’ Jews. Germanization did not only mean population restructuring: it also aimed physically to transform the urban and rural landscape of the Warthegau. In chapter 7 Epstein provides many telling examples of how Jewish forced labour was harnessed to construction projects that formed part of Greiser’s modernizing vision.
Epstein’s account of Greiser’s rule ends with a snapshot of the Warthegau on the eve of being overrun by the Red Army as a Gau of ‘resettlement camps, military hospitals, and overcrowded farms and cities’ (291). Greiser’s delay in ordering evacuation in January 1945 jeopardized for many Germans the chance of getting out safely, while his own rapid decampment brought him humiliation in the remaining weeks of the Third Reich. The biography finishes with Greiser’s trial in Poland and his public execution in Poznań in July 1946.
Overall, Epstein provides a wide-ranging, vivid and readable history of occupation policies in western Poland that engages deftly with continuing debates on Greiser’s role at key junctures, including his role, along with other agencies, in wrangling over the fate of the Litzmannstadt ghetto in 1943–4. The Warthegau did stand out as a laboratory where policies relevant to the Reich as a whole – for instance the drive against the churches – were tried out. But it also forms part of a wider regional history of the Holocaust, and Greiser can be seen as a type of ‘mid-level Nazi official who shaped the Final Solution in his territory and in the process more generally radicalized murderous policy towards Jews in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe’ (182). As a biography, the book memorably conjures up Greiser both in his pomp and in his final days as a condemned prisoner. It captures his self-fashioning as a ‘model Nazi’, his craving for status and power, his visions of turning his Gau into a land of German peasant farms, forests and hiking trails — and the murderous chaos his policies created.