By
– August 31, 2011
The Warthegau was the area of western Poland annexed by Germany after its defeat of Poland in September 1939. The Nazis sought to resettle ethnic Germans in the incorporated territories at the expense of Jews and Poles, who were to be uprooted and resettled in the General-Gouvernment or central part of German-occupied Poland. Subsequently, Jews were placed in ghettos in parts of the Warthegau, the largest of which was the Lodz ghetto. Supervising this massive undertaking was Arthur Greiser, the subject of this important work by Catherine Epstein, a professor of modern European history at Amherst College.
Greiser is not as well known as many other perpetrators of the Holocaust, certainly not as infamous as Hans Frank, Greiser’s counterpart, who was the governor of the General- Gouvernment. Drawing on German and Polish sources, Epstein is the first Western historian to have written a biography of this major war criminal, who was tried by a Polish national tribunal in 1946 and subsequently hanged in front of the house in Poznan that was his residence when he was governor of the Warthegau.
Epstein details the cruel policies Greiser introduced in the Warthegau, which included wide-ranging discriminatory measures against the Polish population and, long before the term ethnic cleansing became part of our political lexicon, he supervised the most brutal form of population destruction against both the Jews and Poles. In the Lodz ghetto Greiser organized the largest forced labor program, and rejected all appeals to improve the food rations of the ghetto Jews. It was also Greiser who praised the men of the German unit that operated the gassing facility at the Chelmno extermination camp, the first of its kind in occupied Poland, where one hundred thousand Jews from the Warthegau had been killed. Greiser was a moral monster. Our gratitude to Epstein for bringing this sordid life to our attention.
Greiser is not as well known as many other perpetrators of the Holocaust, certainly not as infamous as Hans Frank, Greiser’s counterpart, who was the governor of the General- Gouvernment. Drawing on German and Polish sources, Epstein is the first Western historian to have written a biography of this major war criminal, who was tried by a Polish national tribunal in 1946 and subsequently hanged in front of the house in Poznan that was his residence when he was governor of the Warthegau.
Epstein details the cruel policies Greiser introduced in the Warthegau, which included wide-ranging discriminatory measures against the Polish population and, long before the term ethnic cleansing became part of our political lexicon, he supervised the most brutal form of population destruction against both the Jews and Poles. In the Lodz ghetto Greiser organized the largest forced labor program, and rejected all appeals to improve the food rations of the ghetto Jews. It was also Greiser who praised the men of the German unit that operated the gassing facility at the Chelmno extermination camp, the first of its kind in occupied Poland, where one hundred thousand Jews from the Warthegau had been killed. Greiser was a moral monster. Our gratitude to Epstein for bringing this sordid life to our attention.
Jack Fischel is professor emeritus of history at Millersville University, Millersville, PA and author of The Holocaust (Greenwood Press) and Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust (Rowman and Littlefield).
