Genesis des Genozids: Polen 1939-1941 [Gebundene Ausgabe]

With this antology, that contains in its title a brilliant oxymoron, the editors Mallmann and Musial, offer a selection of short but high-quality essays, that had been presented during a symposium between the "Deutschen Historischen Institut" of Warsaw (Musial) and the "Forschungsstelle Ludwigsburg" of the University of Stuttgart (Mallmann), in which various aspect were examined of the Nazi annihilation policy in Poland, carried out during the first years of the German occupation.
In fact, contrary to what is generally believed, not the Soviet Union in Summer 1941, but the Generalgouvernement since September 1939, was transformed in a real "laboratory" for experimentation of the racial and genocidal dynamics: those same "aktionen" that, two years later, were applied on a larger scale, in Ukraine, in Belorussia and in the Baltic area.
Among the European nations subdued to the Nazi yoke, Poland was, without any doubt, the one that suffered the cruellest destiny and for a longest time. In fact, from September 1939 to Spring 1945, when the last strips of Polish territory were taken by the Soviets, Poland was the scene of what we can define as "Weltanschauungskrieg": namely the scientific application of oppression, terror, propaganda and racial dynamics, aiming to the annihilation (not only and not necessarily phisical) of both the ideas of "Polish identity" as individual heritage, and of "Poland" as historical society, and their replacement with the "new order", imposed by the occupiers.
In Poland - i.e. in the Generalgouvernement and in the Polish territories directly annexed to the Reich - were put into the ground, as in a great "dress rehearsal", all the paraphernalia of the Nazi ideology: and apart from the theoretical abstractions, all of this occurred in practice, on a large scale and without any moral scruples or sense of humanity.
In this way, thanks to the articles contained in this agile volume, the misdeeds of the main perpetrators in Autumn 1939, are focused: the Einsatzgruppen (Dorothee Weitbrecht); the Waffen-SS (Martin Cüppers); the Wehrmacht (Jochen Böhler) and the Ordnungspolizei (Mallmann), for which - maybe for the first time in modern history - the real enemy was no longer an hostile army, but a population as a whole, and a civil society as such. And also specific ethnic and social groups, such as the Jews and the disabled persons - being particularly vulnerable members of the society - also become special targets of a systematic and degenerated violence, as explained in the essays of Alberti (Warthegau area) and Rieß (Südostpreussen).
But once the limits of this racial utopia became evident as early as 1940 (given the impossibility to put it into practice within the timeframe dictated by a conflict more and more generalized), in Poland happened also that, this utopia closed the loop, and ended up coming down, in Spring 1942, to its most brutal and senseless aspect: the "final solution" in the death camps of the "Aktion Reinhardt".
Recommended.