Occupation in the East: The Daily Lives of German Occupiers in Warsaw and Minsk, 1939–1944 by Lehnstaedt Stephan (review)

Abstract

SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 580 Lehnstaedt, Stephan. Occupation in the East: The Daily Lives of German Occupiers in Warsaw and Minsk, 1939–1944. Translated by dbmedia. Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford, 2016. xi + 306 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $130.00: £92.00. Stephan Lehnstaedt’s study of the German-Nazi occupations in the eastern reaches during the Second World War is an innovative and complex examination of the daily lives (Alltagsgeschichte) of the thousands of Germans sent to Warsaw in Poland and Minsk in Belorussia — captured on 28 September 1939 and 28 June 1941 respectively. This was a far from homogenous society fragmented according to different institutions (p. 20), burdened with administering a repressive and violent German occupation while pursuing Nazi racial and territorial goals in alien and dangerous territories (Minsk especially because of active Russian partisans). Valuable though his evidence is, Lehnstaedt, nevertheless, goes too far in seeking out the perpetrators of genocide and violence in a ‘collective enterprise marked by the division of labour. […] the participants included not only those people who directly ordered the murders or physically carried them out, but also those who […] contributed to maintaining German occupational rule’ (p. 6). Commonsense dictates the opposite of this latter generalization: not every single German occupier, man or woman, actually witnessed violence against the occupied, much less actively participated in it. Based on a wide range of sources, especially diaries, memoirs and letters of the participants described as ‘ego’ documents, plus testimony provided to postwar German criminal investigators, the intention is to provide insights into how the German occupiers — administrators, policemen, private individuals and members of the SS and the Wehrmacht — understood their roles and duties when serving the Reich in such foreign and hostile environments. These involved daily interactions with colleagues within the same institution, and relations with other and often competing German institutions. Key to everything were German attitudes and behaviour towards the subject Poles and Belorussians. The absolute of Nazi rule was to create as much separation between the superior occupiers and ‘subhuman’ occupied, manifested by the constant violence meted out to the locals. Nevertheless — reinforcing a point made above — Lehnstaedt suggests that ‘one cannot speak of a uniform or normed prejudice among the occupiers. The images of the Germans varied, depending on their level of education, place of deployment, type of job, and social experiences’ (p. 172). Human behaviour is such that these ideals of ‘total separation’ could never be complete. Most German institutions employed locals in which ‘normal’ collegiate working relationships needed to be established. Also, given the essential material shortcomings affecting both REVIEWS 581 occupiers and occupied, Germans were also forced to deal with locals to obtain various means of sustenance: ‘Robbing the locals was often combined with black-market activities’ (p. 136). Some Germans even extended such activity to the officially out of bounds Jewish ghetto (p. 139), euphemistically noted as the ‘Jewish Residential District’ (p. 41). Morale among the occupiers was a perennial problem for Reich officials since ‘the greatest problem that the various office directors had to confront was the homesickness of the occupiers’ (p. 128). Given that spouses were discouraged from travelling east, practical sexual issues for the occupiers often led to ‘the so-called Eastern marriage — that is the relationship of a German with a woman from a racially lower-class ethnicity (normally prohibited) — [which] was by no means rare and could be observed in both cities from the start of the occupation’ (p. 188). An SS judges’ conference in May 1943 was forced to admit that ‘sexual relations with members of the population of other races was customary for around half of all members of the SS and police’ (p. 188). Thus, whilst ‘normal’ emotional and sexual relationships with female members of the occupied was out of the question as constituting ‘racial defilement’, paid sex with ‘good looking Polish girls’ was approved of in officially established brothels (p. 189). Lehnstaedt’s study provides valuable new insights into the nuanced nature of the German-Nazi occupations in Warsaw and Minsk. However, one gets the distinct impression that his findings exist in a vacuum since there is hardly any chronological historical context his evidence...