Model Nazi

On a sunny morning in July 1946, a crowd of 15,000 Poles attended a public hanging in the recently liberated city of Poznan. The man executed that day was Arthur Greiser, the former Nazi Party leader in the so-called Warthegau, an area of Western Poland annexed to Germany after the invasion of September 1939. For decades, Greiser remained a strangely elusive character in the extensive literature on the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe, even though few played a more important role in it. At the peak of his career during the war, he was arguably one of the most powerful local Nazi administrators in Hitler's empire. From his headquarters in Poznan, Greiser carried out a ruthless policy of Germanisation in Western Poland, a policy that aimed at total control over the conquered population, the obliteration of its former national character, and the extermination of all those whose existence could not be reconciled with Nazi ideology. The utopia of an ethnically cleansed Nazi Empire was to be created through the identification of ‘valuable’ racial stock among the non-German populations, and the parallel expulsion and murder of those deemed to be ‘racially unsuitable’

Ancient history · Archaeology · Character (mathematics · Economic history · Empire · German · Ideology · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · World War II · Demography · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · European history and politics · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law