Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland

by Catherine Epstein

Overview

Model Nazi tells the story of Arthur Greiser, the man who initiated the Final Solution in Nazi-occupied Poland. Between 1939 and 1945, Greiser was the territorial leader of the Warthegau, an area of western Poland annexed to Nazi Germany. In an effort to make the Warthegau "German," Greiser introduced numerous cruel policies. He spearheaded an influx of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans. He segregated Germans from Poles, and introduced wide-ranging discriminatory measures against the Polish population. He refashioned the urban and natural landscape to make it "German." And even more chillingly, the first and longest standing ghetto, the largest forced labour program, and the first mass gassings of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe were all initiated under Greiser's jurisdiction.

Who was the man behind these dreadful policies? Catherine Epstein gives us a compelling biographical portrait of Greiser the man: his birth in the German-Polish borderlands, his rise to Nazi prominence in Danzig, his actions as party leader in the Warthegau, and his trial and execution in postwar Poland. Drawing on a remarkable array of German and Polish sources, she shows how nationalist obsessions, political jealousies, and personal insecurities shaped the policies of a man who held remarkable power in his Nazi fiefdom. Throughout, Epstein confronts a burning question of our age: why do individuals imagine genocide and ethnic cleansing to be solutions to political problems?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199646531
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/30/2012
Series:	Oxford Studies in Modern European History
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Catherine Epstein teaches modern European history at Amherst College. She is the author of The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and Their Century (2003) and A Past Renewed: German-Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States After 1933 (1993), and she also serves as Associate Editor of the journal Central European History.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 'Child of the East:' Posen Province, World War I, Danzig
Chapter 2 'Little Maria:' Love and Political Intrigue in Danzig
Chapter 3 'The Nicest Time of My Life:' Senate President
Chapter 4 The 'Model Gau:' The Warthegau
Chapter 5 'A Blonde Province:' Resettlement, Deportation, Murder
Chapter 6 'The German is the Master:' Apartheid in the Warthegau
Chapter 7 'The Most Modern Streets:' Exploiting Poles and Jews to Make the Gau German
Chapter 8 'Feudal Duke:' Rule and Loss
Chapter 9 'Two Souls in My Breast:' Trial and Execution
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"[an] authoritatively sourced and minutely examined study" — John P. Fox, Slavonic and East European Review

"Epstein's biography of Greiser is careful and rigorous."—Holocaust and Genocide Studies

"This is the best work on Nazi Germany that I've read in a long time. Far from being a pedantic yet scholarly work, Model Nazi is eminently readable for the popular market, and thus hard to put down. I can't recommend it highly enough!"—The Military Advisor

"Drawing on German and Polish sources, Epstein is the first Western historian to have written a biography of this major war criminal...Our gratitude to [her] for bringing this sordid life to our attention."—Jewish Book World

"A valuable new biography."—The New York Review of Books

From the Publisher