Model Nazi Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland

The compelling story of Arthur Greiser, the man who initiated the Final Solution in Nazi-occupied Poland. Between 1939 and 1945, Greiser was the territorial leader of the Warthegau, an area of western Poland annexed to Nazi Germany. In an effort to make the Warthegau 'German,' Greiser introduced numerous cruel policies, spearheading an influx of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans, segregating Germans from Poles, and introducing wide-ranging discriminatorymeasures against the Polish population. Even more chillingly, his jurisdiction oversaw the creation of the first and longest standing ghetto, the largest forced labour program, and the first mass gassings of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Catherine Epstein teaches modern European history at Amherst College. She is the author of The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and Their Century (2003) and A Past Renewed: German-Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States After 1933 (1993), and she also serves as Associate Editor of the journal Central European History.