Stephan Lehnstedt. New York: Berghahn Books, Incorporated , Ever since Christopher Browning in opened a new path for Holocaust researchers, positing that even ordinary men can become war criminals, considerable effort has gone into study of the perpetrators.
Besatzeralltag in Warschau under Minsk, , which this volume makes available in translation to English readers. The German military personnel and civilian officials who staffed the occupation regimes in Warsaw and Minsk not only made possible the great crimes that took places there, but found in the structure of daily life a justification of their own willing participation.
In place of a catalogue of executions and toll of the dead and biographies of the men who pulled the triggers, the author examines the conditions and experiences of daily life of the occupiers.
And he focuses on the most banal of perpetrators—soldiers, police, administrators, railwaymen, switchboard operators, both military and civilian, male and female—who were on duty in the General Government of Poland and the Reich Commissariat for the East.
The analysis proceeds from the proposition that these functionaries, though they did not carry out the mass killing, were nonetheless a part of the murder machine in real sense. And Occupation in the East is an analysis of just this part of the machinery of death. The society of the occupiers is first assayed in some detail.
