Winstone , Martin The Dark Heart of Hitler's Europe: Nazi Rule in Poland under the General Government (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 583 by faith alone, a Protestant doctrine he came to embrace openly. In language remarkably similar to that used by Repenter preachers, Trifa wrote that ‘our victory rests on accepting the Lord’ (p. 158). He encouraged a lay leadership of the movement and discouraged hierarchy. Many of Trifa’s ideas looked and sounded like Evangelical Protestantism. Like Iosif Trifa, Father Tudor Popescu from the Stork’s Nest (the Orthodox church of St Stephen in Bucharest) began preaching Protestant doctrines, such as personal conversion and justification by faith alone. So did Dumitru Cornilescu, who was welcome at the Stork’s Nest, and was well known in the 1920s for translating the Bible into Romanian, a version fully embraced by Repenter groups to this day. However, both Popescu and Cornilescu were soon accused of theological heresies, and by 1924 had been defrocked and removed from the Orthodox Church, while Trifa was defrocked and removed from the Orthodox Church in 1934 over alleged financial impropriety. What is not mentioned here is that Trifa was rehabilitated post-mortem in 1990, and the movement he founded is now part of the Romanian Orthodox Church again. Sectarianism and Renewal in 1920s Romania successfully introduces and systematizes a period about which not much has been written until now in the English-language scholarship. It is highly recommended for use by scholars of religion, historians and specialists in East European studies. Undergraduate and graduate students will appreciate it too. Concordia University, Montreal Lucian Turcescu Winstone, Martin. The Dark Heart of Hitler’s Europe: Nazi Rule in Poland under the General Government. I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 2021. xi + 306 pp. Maps Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £17.99 (paperback). The ‘dark heart’ of the Third Reich’s occupied territories in wartime Europe was the General Gouvernement (GG) of Poland. Following Germany’s victory over the Polish Army in September 1939, and the Soviet Union’s occupation of eastern Poland on 17 September as per the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 23 August 1939, the GG formally came into existence on 12 October 1939 through a Führer decree that came into force a fortnight later, as a separate administrative and political entity within one part of German occupied former Polish territory (other such territories had been annexed or formed into new territories by the Third Reich). From the beginning, Third Reich intentions were to treat the GG and its inhabitants as a predatory ‘colonial’ territory, solely to serve the Reich and SEER, 99, 3, JULY 2021 584 principally as a reservoir of slave labour. Besides also becoming a horrendous proving ground for Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler’s grandiose plans to Germanize the territory with ethnic Germans, principally from the Baltic States after 22 June 1941, which involved the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of established Polish and Jewish communities by uprooting them en masse, it became the site of the mass murder of Jews in the Aktion Reinhard extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka — thus highlighting ‘the role of the General Government as the principal racial laboratory of the Third Reich’ (p. 12). Brutality, starvation and lawless terror became the watchword of the Nazi regime, where ‘anything goes’ distinguished this largely criminal German rule ‘from the ostensibly more traditional forms of occupation policy practised elsewhere in Europe’ (p. 15). As the Polish poet and socialist activist Czesław Miłosz put it, the history of the GG was a ‘study of human madness which defied rational explanation’ (p. 246). This paperback edition of the 2014 book comes with its text and bibliography unchanged, together with original glowing paeans of praise for its claimed signal contribution to the history of the Nazi Third Reich in providing the first English-language study of the region. It is not an historical monograph in the normal sense or based on archival sources but is one which overwhelmed historians can sometimes be grateful for (as the comprehensive bibliography confirms), as a well-written synthesis of authoritative publications on the subjects involved. However, too often, instead of key historical developments being related to each other chronologically, the emphasis here is upon a ‘thematic’ construct. Whilst that treatment can focus attention more acutely on some elements...