Gordon J. Horwitz . Ghettostadt: Łodź and the Making of a Nazi City . Cambridge : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press . 2008 . Pp. 395. $29.95.

Abstract

On 9 November 1939, following several weeks of debate and deliberation among Nazi occupation authorities, the industrial city of Łodź and its environs were incorporated into Reichsgau Wartheland, the largest of Germany's new eastern provinces carved from the remains of the vanquished Polish Republic. The annexation of Łodź to the Reich demanded, according to National Socialist theories of race and space, the comprehensive Germanization of the city. Demographically, economically, and aesthetically, Łodź was to become a German metropolis, permanently integrated within the structure of the ethno-territorial German nation-state. What this vast makeover entailed for the city and its roughly 650,000 inhabitants, particularly its population of more than 200,000 Jews, is the subject of Gordon J. Horwitz's richly detailed new study. Horwitz explores two parallel but inexorably linked processes, one “constructive,” the other decidedly destructive, aimed at transforming Polish-Jewish Łodź into the thriving German city of Litzmannstadt. A German city obviously required Germans. Exact population statistics are impossible to determine—the last prewar Polish census was conducted in 1931—but we can deduce that ethnic Germans constituted less than ten percent of Łodź's residents on the eve of World War II. Many more were needed to give Łodź a predominantly German character, and to this end, tens of thousands of ethnic Germans were resettled in the city during the Nazi occupation. They were not only resettled; they were resettled according to a plan. Within his investigation of “constructive” Germanization, Horwitz examines the many facets of Nazi urban planning, from the physical placement of Germans (and others) within the city to the modernization of its economy and infrastructure and the beautification of its streets and parks. The sowing of German Kultur was also an essential component of Nazi Germanization efforts, and Horwitz describes at length the range of cultural events staged by the occupiers to reinforce “the German lifestyle and German spirit” of Litzmannstadt (p. 104). Through this composite of initiatives, the Nazi regime sought to construct an unassailable outpost of German settlement in the East and to make Litzmannstadt unambiguously German for all time.