Occupation in the East

Following their occupation by the Third Reich, Warsaw and Minsk became home to tens of thousands of Germans. This study provides a nuanced portrait of their lives, as they acclimated to the daily routines of life in the East while helping to lay the groundwork for systematic mass murder.

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Following their occupation by the Third Reich, Warsaw and Minsk became home to tens of thousands of Germans. In this exhaustive study, Stephan Lehnstaedt provides a nuanced, eye-opening portrait of the lives of these men and women, who constituted a surprisingly diverse population—including everyone from SS officers to civil servants, as well as ethnically German city residents—united in its self-conception as a “master race.” Even as they acclimated to the daily routines and tedium of life in the East, many Germans engaged in acts of shocking brutality against Poles, Belarusians, and Jews, while social conditions became increasingly conducive to systematic mass murder.